There are too many funerals and jail cells
The deaths of Nolan Wells and Daniel Erving should be a serious wakeup call for Black America. Two eighteen-year-old athletes. Wells went out on a Fourth of July boat trip to Horn Island off the Mississippi coast, and when his friends came back to the dock he was not with them, and two days later he was found dead. Erving was last seen on April 13 jumping from a railroad bridge into Lake Ray Hubbard near Rowlett, Texas, with two other teenagers. In both cases the answers came slowly or have not come at all, and in both cases it was the family, not the system, that had to force the question. Wells’s autopsy and toxicology results are still pending, and the sheriff said early that he did not suspect foul play but did not explain why. Erving’s death was ruled an accidental drowning, and the only charges filed so far are against two teenagers accused of failing to report what happened and then throwing his clothes into a tree line and his cellphone into a ditch. His family is now begging a district attorney to take the case to a grand jury.
And in Columbia, South Carolina, there is Cyrus Carmack-Belton. He was fourteen years old. On May 28, 2023, a convenience store owner named Rick Chow and his son accused him of stealing water bottles and chased him roughly 130 yards down Springtree Drive, a football field and then some, and Chow shot him in the back. Cyrus had stolen nothing. Video showed him returning the bottles, and police confirmed he took nothing from that store. On June 1 of this year, a Richland County jury acquitted Chow of murder. The defense said the boy had pointed a handgun at Chow’s son. Prosecutors said the gun had fallen from his pocket when he took a hard fall and that he was scooping it up as he ran away, and the solicitor pointed out that the only people who testified they saw him aim it were named Chow. The solicitor said afterward that he still believes the shooting was not justifiable, and that he respects the jury’s decision. Cyrus’s family said it plainly: a jury watched a fourteen-year-old run from two grown men on video, knew one of them shot him in the back, and still found that no one was to blame. Outside the gas station, people stood holding water bottles in the air.
Meanwhile, in a Collin County courtroom, a jury sentenced 19-year-old Karmelo Anthony to 35 years for the stabbing death of 17-year-old Austin Metcalf at a track meet. One family buried a son. Another watched theirs led away in handcuffs. Too many of our young Black men are dying or spending their lives in prison. The Black community must act. And here is what should shake us most: these are the cases that made the news.
I write this as a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer. I have represented countless young Black men. I have sat with them in holding cells and interview rooms, and I have sat with their mothers in courthouse hallways waiting on a verdict. I have stood next to the ones who did it and the ones who did not, and I have taken calls from families whose sons were already gone before anyone thought to write the name down. Almost none of them had a lawyer at a podium. Almost none of them had a crowd outside holding water bottles in the air. That is who this article is about.
Six Percent of the Country, Forty-Four Percent of the Dead
Around the nation it is shocking to see the number of young Black men who are victims of homicide, and almost none of them get a camera, a lawyer, a rally, or a name the country learns. In 2024 there were 10,533 Black homicide victims in the United States, and 85.3 percent of them were male. That is roughly 8,985 Black men and boys in a single year. There were 20,255 homicide victims in this country that year, all races, all ages, all causes. Do that arithmetic slowly. Black men and boys are about 6.6 percent of the American population and roughly 44 percent of everyone murdered in America. Nothing else in our national life is that far out of balance. The Black male homicide victimization rate in 2024 was 39.0 per 100,000, more than seven and a half times the white male rate of 5.1, and the year before it was 46.1 against 5.7, a toll the Violence Policy Center counted as 236 Black lives every week, nearly 34 every day.
For the Young, It Is Not a Gap. It Is a Canyon.
Cyrus was fourteen. In 2024 he would have been one of 1,095 Black homicide victims in this country who had not yet turned eighteen. Homicide remains the leading cause of death for Black Americans between ten and twenty-four years old, and it has been the leading cause of death for Black men ages 15 to 44 for more than half a century. In the nation’s twenty largest counties, Black men ages 15 to 24 die from gun homicides at nearly 23 times the rate of white men the same age. And in 2024, more Black men ages 15 to 24 died in gun homicides than from unintentional injuries, suicide, heart disease, cancer, nonfirearm homicides, diabetes, congenital abnormalities, chronic respiratory disease, police shootings, cerebrovascular disease, sepsis, influenza and pneumonia, and HIV combined. RAND estimates roughly one in every 38 Black men will die at the hands of a firearm. If a virus were doing this to any other group of American sons, we would have a task force, a czar, a telethon, and a wing of the CDC.
What It Costs Us in Years
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that Black male life expectancy fell from 71.4 years in 2019 to 67.7 in 2020, while white male life expectancy fell only from 76.4 to 74.9, and that in both 2020 and 2021, at the height of a global pandemic, homicide contributed more to the Black and white gap in male life expectancy than any other cause of death, including COVID-19. Rising homicide alone accounted for 26 percent of the widening of that gap. Read that again. We lost more years of Black male life to each other than to the plague.
Twice as Likely to Go Unsolved
My concern is that we simply don’t value Black life. No one can convince me that this wouldn’t be a top priority if it were playing out in white neighborhoods. And the data says out loud what we already feel. The Council of State Governments Justice Center analyzed FBI homicide data from 2020 through 2024 and found that killings of Black people were 25 percentage points less likely to be solved than killings of white people, and killings of men were 17 points less likely to be solved. Nationally, a homicide with a Black victim was almost twice as likely to go unsolved in 2023 as one with a white victim. The Washington Post’s investigation found arrests in 63 percent of killings with white victims and 46 percent with Black victims.
Counted, Then Forgotten
Recently, I visited the website of a local news channel, and the top stories were dominated by Black tragedies, especially of young Black men. But look closer at how we are covered. Researchers at Stanford and the University of Chicago read every story on all 762 Chicago homicides in 2016 and found that victims in majority white neighborhoods were about twice as likely to be written about as full human beings, 35 percent against 17 percent, and received about 450 more words apiece. Some Black victims had their names misspelled. Yet there is no national policy, no leadership, nothing coming from the White House or Congress.
Thirty to One
Police killed 302 Black people in the United States in 2025. Every one of those deaths deserves scrutiny, and we fought for that scrutiny and we were right to. But roughly 8,985 Black men and boys were killed in ordinary American homicides in a single year, thirty times as many, and there is no commission, no hearing, no hashtag.
The Chain We Can Break
Therefore, Black parents must take up the cause themselves. Two facts should guide us. First, this is not organized crime and it is not fate. Where the circumstances are known, 77 percent of Black victims were killed by someone they knew, 80.9 percent of the killings had nothing to do with any other felony, and 56.1 percent of those grew out of an argument. A dispute, a gun within reach, four seconds, a funeral. I have read that file more times than I can count. That is a chain we can break, and it breaks at the link between the argument and the weapon.
Second, it can be broken, because it already is bending. The gun homicide rate among Black Americans fell nearly 28 percent between 2020 and 2024, the second fastest decline of any group in the country, though it remains above 2019 and still the highest of any group. Thousands of our sons are alive today who would not have been at 2020 rates, and that decline drew no more national attention than the surge did, which tells you the silence was never really about the numbers.
The Outrage Is Here
So let no one tell us this community is indifferent. Half of Black adults call gun violence a very big problem in their own neighborhood, against 11 percent of white adults, and 71 percent of us say we or someone we love has lived through it. The outrage is here. It has always been here. What is missing is a country willing to meet it. Until that changes, we will meet it ourselves, in our own homes, at our own kitchen tables, with our own sons, and we will start tonight.
