So when I watch what Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan have built over these last 13 years, something in my chest loosens. Two Black men who found each other early in their Hollywood journeys and decided, apparently on purpose, that the other one winning was a good thing. Not a threat. A blessing.

The years line it up plainer than I could.

Start with Fruitvale Station back in 2013. Coogler was 26, working on his first feature, and he chose to tell the story of Oscar Grant, the young man shot by a transit police officer on an Oakland platform on New Year’s morning in 2009. A hard thing to put on screen. He needed an actor who could make you love a flawed brother across 90 short minutes, so that when the bullet came it took something out of you too. He picked Jordan. Jordan had already done strong work in television and film, but neither man was a major Hollywood name yet. Both were betting on the other.

That is the part folks skip when they tell this. It was mutual risk. A first time director trusting an actor with the most important thing he had made. An actor trusting that same director not to waste his face and his time on something small.

Then came Creed in 2015. Coogler took a franchise everybody assumed belonged to Sylvester Stallone forever and handed the gloves to Jordan. The picture worked. Stallone got an Oscar nomination out of it. The whole thing felt less like a reboot and more like a passing of something sacred. A Black face at the heart of a story white America had held close for four decades, and not one soul had to be pushed aside for it to happen that way.

Which brings us to Black Panther in 2018. Now here is where a lesser pairing might have cracked. The director is running a billion dollar Marvel machine, and the actor is playing the villain. Not the hero. The villain. Killmonger. And Jordan took that role and made him one of the most quoted, most argued about, most mourned villains in the whole comic book business. He did not sulk about not wearing the crown. He knew a great villain is what makes a hero worth a damn. Serve the picture, you serve your partner. Lift your partner, and somehow you come up too.

You see the pattern yet? Each time, one of them stepped back a half step so the other could move forward a full one. And somehow they both kept rising.

By the time we reached Creed III, Jordan had moved behind the camera himself. He directed the picture, while Coogler, who helped develop the story and served as a producer, backed his longtime collaborator as he took that next step. Jordan turned it into the highest grossing film of the Creed trilogy. Plenty of partnerships get strange when one person starts occupying territory the other once owned. This one kept moving forward.

Then Sinners. 2025. Their fifth film with Coogler directing Jordan, counting Jordan’s brief return as Killmonger in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and the first that belonged to nobody but them. No Rocky. No Marvel. No existing thing to lean on. Coogler wrote an original vampire story set in the Mississippi Delta in 1932, put Jordan in it as twin brothers named Smoke and Stack, and dared the whole industry to bet against him. Warner Bros. put down a reported $90 million on an R rated horror movie with no built in audience, and gave Coogler an unusually filmmaker friendly deal that included ownership rights reverting to him after 25 years.

And it hit. More than $370 million at the worldwide box office. It became the highest grossing original live action film domestically in 15 years, going all the way back to Nolan’s Inception. People lined up. Old folks, teenagers, film nerds, my barber. Everybody had seen it or was about to tell you why they were going.

The money is not even the part that stayed with me, though. Watch what happened next.

This past March, at the 2026 Academy Awards, Sinners showed up holding 16 nominations. Sixteen. That topped Titanic. It topped La La Land. No single film in the entire history of that ceremony had ever pulled more. Coogler won for his screenplay, the first Oscar win of his career. And Michael B. Jordan, on his very first nomination, took home Best Actor.

Jordan got up to accept and did not rush through his mama and his agent and hustle off. He stayed at that microphone and called the roll of Black Oscar winners whose footsteps he was following. Sidney Poitier. Denzel Washington. Halle Berry. Jamie Foxx. Forest Whitaker. Will Smith. Named them so the room would remember whose shoulders he was standing on.

That is a man who knows he did not arrive alone. And he was only up there because somebody, more than a decade back, said I want you for this and truly meant it.

I keep thinking about the brothers coming up now, scrolling their phones, being told again in a thousand fresh ways that another man’s shine dims their own. That your homeboy’s promotion is somehow your failure. That there is one plate on the table and you had better grab yours before it is gone. I want every last one of them to look at these two.

Because what Coogler and Jordan proved, over and over, on the biggest stages this culture has to offer, is that the old math was a lie the whole time. Two Black men lifted each other and neither one shrank in the process. The director got his masterpiece. The actor got his statue. And the rest of us got to watch, for once, brotherhood do exactly what brotherhood was always supposed to do. Build something.

Not compete. Build.

My granddaddy had a saying about how a flame gives up nothing of itself when it lights the wick next to it. He mostly said it about church folk who guarded their little bit of authority like it was gold. But he could just as easily have been talking about these two men, who have looked across more than a decade at one another and decided, again and again, that the surest way up was side by side.

That is the lesson sitting right there in plain sight. We were never actually each other’s competition. We were always supposed to be each other’s proof.

Staff Writer; Lee Walker

This brother is a fitness trainer with 12 years of experience, focused on building strength, clarity, and real health within the Black community. Through his writing, Mr. Walker hopes to uplift younger Black men and men in general through honest conversations about fitness, financial pressure, fatherhood, discipline, mental wellness, and the importance of brotherhood.

Have questions? Reach me at LeeW@ThyBlackMan.com

That choice matters to me, and I suspect it should matter to any brother past forty who feels welded to a role he got handed long ago.

We get typed early. Somebody decides who you are before you finish deciding for yourself. You become the provider, the steady one, the fellow nobody worries about because he handles his business and never complains. Then you wake up around fifty and notice the costume fused to your skin somewhere along the way. You are still playing a character written by other people, and the script offers no third act.

His Airness had every reason to stay frozen. The safest move for a legend is to keep selling the legend. Show up, wave, cash the check, let everybody keep calling you the greatest. Plenty of famous athletes pick that path. They spend their back nine performing a younger version of themselves for a crowd that only wants the highlight reel.

MJ went a different direction, and the racing chapter tells you plenty about why.

23XI Racing, the team he co-owns with Denny Hamlin, spent well over a year at war with NASCAR itself. Two organizations accused the sport of running a monopoly, and rather than fold, Michael sat in a Charlotte courtroom during the trial and testified about a boyhood spent visiting tracks in Charlotte, Rockingham, Darlington, and Talladega. Late in 2025, the sides settled, producing evergreen charters and revised terms for NASCAR’s chartered teams, although the financial details remained confidential. Then the 2026 season opened and Tyler Reddick captured the Daytona 500 in the No. 45 before following it with victories in Atlanta and at the Circuit of the Americas. He became the first driver in Cup Series history to win the opening three races of a season.

Sit with that. A billionaire in his sixties, comfortable beyond arithmetic, chose to wage a bruising legal battle for a garage full of folks who are not him. In his own words, the goal was the betterment of the sport, and he was willing to risk the future of 23XI if that was what change required. That is not somebody guarding a statue of himself. What you are watching is a grown adult who located a fresh thing worth caring about and threw his whole chest into it.

The water tells the same story in a softer key.

Jordan owns a Viking sportfishing vessel measuring 80 feet, wrapped in that elephant print and christened Catch 23. He and his crew enter blue marlin tournaments at places like Morehead City, once hauling in a fish weighing 442.3 pounds and grinning on the dock like rookies who just made the squad. Golf works on him the same way. He told an interviewer that he played almost every day, usually thirty six holes. People close to him have described the course as a mental escape, a place where the noise surrounding Michael Jordan can finally quiet down.

What gets me is that none of these pursuits carry the weight his basketball did. Nobody measures him against Bird or Magic on a fishing boat. No documentary crew judges his backswing against 1996. He picked arenas where the only judge is himself, and I think that is the whole secret. His younger self could finally rest.

That is the freedom I want older brothers to see clearly, because it has almost nothing to do with the money.

Yes, the fortune is absurd. Forbes put his 2026 figure at 4.3 billion dollars, placing him among the wealthiest former athletes in the world. Decades of endorsement income, led by his relationship with Nike, built a large part of it. Another major payday came when he sold his majority interest in the Charlotte Hornets in 2023. The franchise was valued at 3 billion dollars, nearly eleven times the 275 million dollars he paid in 2010, and he retained a minority stake. Those dollars are real. But cash is not the lesson. A working brother reading this cannot buy a sportfishing yacht, and does not need to. What he can borrow is the posture underneath it, the willingness to say the person I used to be served his purpose, and now I get to meet somebody else.

The giving makes that plainest of all.

Late in 2025, Michael handed 10 million dollars to Novant Health in Wilmington, the town where he came up. Novant said the gift brought the total its foundation had received from him to 27 million dollars. He aimed the new money at neuroscience care for stroke, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other complex conditions, and asked that the institute carry his mother’s name, Deloris. A dedication ceremony arrived early in 2026. Consider the arc there. As a sophomore at Laney High School, he failed to make varsity and played junior varsity instead, a disappointment he turned into fuel. MJ became maybe the most competitive human on the planet. That same man now spends real energy helping families across southeastern North Carolina reach advanced neurological care. The institute carries his mother’s name, not his own. His scoreboard changed for good.

None of this erases the flaws. The gambling tales are real, the coldness he showed teammates is documented, the ego was a monster. Becoming somebody new does not require pretending the earlier version was a saint. It only requires believing the next chapter can be written at all.

That belief is the quiet gift he is handing the rest of us.

What wears down brothers our age is the sense that the die got cast years back. You are the funny one, the hard one, the churchgoing one, the fellow who buried his own dreams so the kids could chase theirs. Fine. Those parts held you up when you needed holding. But a part is not a cage, and fifty is nowhere close to a verdict. Pick up fishing at fifty three if the water calls you. Go back to school. Plant a garden, learn the bass, fall in love all over again. Build a thing with your hands that has nothing to do with the man your people always swore you were.

His Airness did not find that permission in a trophy case. He found it in the ordinary human act of getting curious again about being alive.

We can find it in the same place. The former self earned his rest, so let him have it. And the person still breathing gets to go see what else the deep water holds.

Staff Writer; J.G. Lacour

Covering the NBA, NFL, college basketball, college football, and Major League Baseball from a Black man’s perspective. He loves the full world of sports, but the NFL remains his favorite.

Need to contact this bro, feel free to use this email address; JGLacour@ThyBlackMan.com.

I understand where the feeling comes from. Truly. We watched him tumble down the board in 2025 while weaker prospects heard their names first, and plenty of us felt that fall in our own chests. Some of it looked foul. Yet there is daylight between having a brother’s back and wrapping him in so much padding that he can never move.

He is 24 now, smack in the middle of a 2026 battle for the starting job against Deshaun Watson. Second year in Cleveland, with Todd Monken running the show since he took the reins in January. The veteran got first crack at it. Cleveland’s second-year pro has been clawing to close the gap. None of that is persecution. That is a regular Tuesday in the National Football League.

Remember how his rookie run actually looked. He started the final stretch, went 3 and 4, tossed 7 scores against 10 interceptions, and his QBR settled somewhere around 18.9. Nobody calls those numbers a triumph. Branding them a scandal misses just as badly. They are a baseline. Green passers throw the ball to the wrong jersey. Peyton Manning threw a rookie-record 28 picks in 1998 and still carved out a gold-jacket career. Bradshaw? They booed him out of Pittsburgh early, benched the man more than once, and the rings came much later. Happens to the great ones all the time. They stink early, take their lumps in public, then figure it out. This league does not care what name is stitched across your shoulders.

Here is the part nobody wants to say out loud. A good chunk of the loudest voices online are not protecting the kid at all. They are protecting a storyline. If he sits, it has to be racism. Praise the veteran’s footwork and that becomes sabotage. Mention those 10 giveaways and a beat writer becomes a hater. So a competitor who by every account itches to compete gets frozen into a permanent victim by the same people swearing they love him.

That framing helps him not one bit. None. When you tell a professional that nothing is ever his fault, you are quietly informing him that he holds no power to fix a single thing. Sit with that. You strip a man of his agency and slap a bow on it and call it support.

I have coached a little, watched a lot, and lived long enough to recognize the pattern with our sons. There is a deep instinct among us to shield the young men in our lives, because the world has been swinging at them since forever. That instinct is sacred. It kept a whole lot of us breathing. Every good thing carries a shadow, though, and the shadow here is simple: a boy who never tastes a real consequence never grows into the thing he is chasing.

Losing teaches. Harshly. It mails its lessons collect. Shedeur needs to sail one over a receiver’s head on third and 6, feel that long walk back to the bench, sit in a dim film room on Monday while the tape freezes on a blown coverage read, then go repair it. That grind is how signal-callers get built. There is no elevator past it. Josh Allen handed the ball to defenses again and again before that light clicked on.

Deshaun deserves a fair mention too. The 30-year-old had barely seen live action since 2024 before this preseason, grinding back after rupturing his Achilles and then suffering another rupture of the same tendon that required a second surgery, riding a contract that finally runs dry after this season. Do not paint him as an untouchable monarch guarding the gate. Back nine of a career, the man is just trying to prove the arm still works. Should the younger option play better, that option starts. If not, the incumbent keeps studying tape and waiting a turn. Both truths can sit at the same table.

Preseason has painted a muddy picture so far. Against the Bears, neither guy grabbed the room by the collar, Cleveland ate a 34 to 10 loss, and the moment nobody wanted was a pass that nestled into the wrong colors. Then came Buffalo today, August 22nd, when the staff handed number 2 the whole first half, even though Cleveland rested most of its veteran starters and put him behind a second-string offensive line with mostly backups around him. Shedeur completed his first eight throws and finished 9 of 11 for 74 yards, one touchdown and one interception. Watson followed and went 5 of 12 for 35 yards with an interception as Cleveland lost 31 to 7. Shedeur was the better quarterback on this particular afternoon. None of that means the job belongs to him now. It means he got a fair look and did something with it.

Will he seize the job by September 13 down in Jacksonville? Maybe. Maybe not. Monken still has not named his starter, and Saturday gave him something more to chew on rather than settling the matter cleanly. Shedeur helped himself against Buffalo. Watson did not slam the door. Cleveland still has a preseason finale against New England on August 27, although the staff may make its decision before then. Fine. A clipboard is not a coffin either way. Aaron Rodgers waited 3 seasons in Green Bay. Steve Young studied behind Joe Montana and squeezed every drop from it. Waiting only wrecks a passer who chooses to pout while he waits.

What actually worries me is not the depth chart. It is the noise around it. A whole ecosystem now feeds off manufactured outrage on his behalf, because a wronged prospect prints clicks better than a developing one ever could. Each week they will dig up fresh insult. Maybe a snap count. Then some stray quote. Or a survey that placed him 35th out of 35 veteran quarterbacks entering the season, which, sure, stings, though who on earth cares in August.

The funny twist is that the young man himself seems to grasp all this. Ask about the derby and you get a shrug, plus a line about the only rival worth naming being the face in the mirror. No panic. Zero alibis. Healthier than half the folks defending him from their phones. So there stands a competitor, going hard, while the comment section litigates.

So my plea, from somebody who has watched this business chew up hyped prospects and lift overlooked ones in equal measure: turn him loose. Give him room to fail on a Sunday and answer for it at the podium afterward. A staff should hold him to a standard without anybody screaming for a firing. All of it, the sweet and the sour, is tuition owed.

Deion’s boy is not spun from glass. Locker rooms raised him. Boulder saw that program hauled across his shoulders, 4,134 yards and 37 touchdowns in a final college fall, so the glare of bright lights is old news. Our lane is not to fight his battles. His alone is to fight them.

Stumble, rise, repeat. That is the assignment handed to every kid who ever strapped on a helmet. This franchise gave him an honest shot this August. Against Buffalo, he took one more step toward making the decision difficult. Let the process breathe, and let the rest of us unclench and quit treating a plain old competition like some crime against the culture.

He will be alright. Just clear the room and let him work.

Staff Writer; J.G. Lacour

Covering the NBA, NFL, college basketball, college football, and Major League Baseball from a Black man’s perspective. He loves the full world of sports, but the NFL remains his favorite.

Need to contact this bro, feel free to use this email address; JGLacour@ThyBlackMan.com.

Let me say this plain, and let me say it with love. You were never required to become Barack Obama to have lived a life that counts.

Understand me here. This is no swipe at the man from Chicago. His journey deserves every bit of the honor it receives. The law degree, the long odds, two terms in the highest office, that calm he kept while folks threw everything at him. He carried it well. What I am wrestling with is the quiet falsehood that slipped into too many of our hearts, the one whispering that anything less than history amounts to nothing.

Think about the men who raised you. Was your granddaddy president? Mine surely was not. He drove a delivery route for 30 years. Came home wrung out most nights. He would settle onto that porch anyway, and out came whatever the day had taught him. Watch people close before you trust them. That was his big one. A promise stayed a promise with him, even the ones that dug into his pocket. He had no patience for anybody who could not meet his eyes. Nothing the man ever said made the news. Somehow he built something anyway. And what he built was me.

Here is a fact the headlines rarely hand you. A landmark federal study based on data collected from 2006 through 2010 found that Black dads who lived with their children were among the most involved fathers in America on much of the daily work that actually raises a child, the feeding, the bathing, the reading at night, the homework, the showing up. Black fathers living apart from their children also showed strong involvement on several measures. The CDC says comparable figures are no longer collected, so those numbers should not be mistaken for new 2026 data. Still, the findings challenged a stereotype that had been repeated for generations. That old story suggesting Black fathers simply do not show up never told the whole truth. And right this minute, across your city, fathers are quietly doing the holy, thankless work of simply being around.

No cameras rolling. Not a lick of applause. That is a victory. Write it in capital letters somewhere in your mind.

Winning wears plain clothes most days. It looks like a man who keeps a job he does not love because his family eats from it. Sometimes it is a husband who chooses the same woman on the rough mornings, not only the sweet ones. Other times it is an uncle who slides a nephew twenty dollars and a straight talk about staying out of trouble. None of that trends online. All of it holds a neighborhood together.

We have to unlearn the habit of clapping only for the extraordinary. A boy watching his father honor a promise learns more about manhood than he ever will from a documentary about a senator. The old head at the barbershop who tells a teenager to pull his grades up is doing nation work. That deacon who fixes cars for widows at cost is doing the same holy labor. Greatness in our tradition was never reserved for the famous few. It lived in the many who simply refused to quit.

Hear me right, though. None of this is about telling you to play small or go sit down somewhere. Just the opposite. I want you to take that gift of yours and aim it at a target you can actually hit.

Here is where we truly need to grow. Too many of us pour all our political fire into the White House once every four years, then go quiet while the decisions shaping our daily lives get made down the street without us. Your school board helps shape district priorities, curriculum choices, and what happens inside local schools. City council decides which roads get fixed and which blocks get ignored. The county commission moves tax dollars from one place to another. Down at the statehouse, lawmakers write the rules on ballots, on policing, on the very ground under your feet. Those rooms sit half empty of us, and that has to change. In 2026, with the whole country pulling in a dozen directions at once, that kind of ground game matters more than it has in a long while.

You may never sit behind the desk in Washington. So what. Serve on a zoning board. Run for a seat on your local school board. Knock the doors down your street and get folks registered. Give the widow two houses over a ride to the polls come November. When the mayor holds his next town hall, be the voice in the back that will not let him dodge a straight question. Coach a youth team on Saturday. Show up to the county budget hearing where hardly anybody thinks to look, because that dull little meeting decides whether your park stays open. Win a county race, steer real money back into your community, and you have arguably done more tangible good than a thousand speeches delivered from some faraway podium. Statewide power gets built the same way, one county and one district at a time, by Black men willing to do the slow work between elections.

The ones getting this right already walk among us. Look at the mayors quietly running major cities, the organizers building strength all year round in places like Chicago and Mississippi rather than waking up only for the presidential contest. They grasped a truth all of us need. Power that changes your street lives close to home, not a thousand miles up the road.

So grade yourself by a wiser ruler. Can your children count on you? Is your word still worth something when nobody is watching? Are the young ones around you steadier because you exist? Has your corner of the world grown a little more just because you refused to sit on your hands? Those questions carry far more weight than any comparison to a leader whose road was never meant to be yours.

Barack earned his page in history, and we thank God we lived to see it turn. But his life was his assignment. Yours belongs to you. The daddy, the laborer, the neighbor, the mentor, the local official who lands on no magazine cover, that man holds up more than he will ever fully know.

You do not have to be him. Just aim to be a little better than the person you were yesterday. Kinder, maybe. Steadier. Somebody your folks can lean on when the roof starts leaking. Keep at it, one plain day and then the next, and I promise you this much, my brother. That life of yours will have counted for something real. It has always been enough. And it always will be.

Staff Writer; L.L. McKenna

Politics explained through the lens of justice and equity. Offering perspective that informs, challenges, and empowers.

One can contact this brother at; LLMcKenna@ThyBlackMan.com.

Most of what gets published about brothers my age could pass for a case file. Statistics. Warnings. The weight of the world folded into a paragraph and handed to us at breakfast. I have read those pieces. Written a few myself, if I am being honest. There is truth in them, and I will not pretend otherwise. But I am 51 years old now, and I have started to notice how rarely anybody stops to ask whether we are having any fun.

Fun. Plain, ordinary, unearned fun. Let me sit with that instead.

Saturday mornings in my house belong to the record player. A phone would sound fine, cleaner even, and none of that matters to me. The needle coming down is the reason, that small ceremony ahead of the day asking things of me. Coffee first. Then I flip through the crates like a man deciding an important matter, which I suppose I am. Maze featuring Frankie Beverly usually wins. “Golden Time of Day” comes on and the whole room loosens its shoulders. My wife pretends she is annoyed. She is not. By the 2nd track she is humming, and before long she has forgotten whatever she was folding. For a little while after, the whole house runs on rhythm instead of worry, and that is about the closest thing to prayer I reach before noon.

Nobody sold me on this when I was younger. No one told me gladness could be a practice. I thought it arrived, or it did not. Chase money and respect long enough, I figured, and one day both would drop happiness on the porch like a package. What actually came was smaller and better. I learned to reach for the good feeling. On purpose. Before the hours had done anything to earn it.

Take the car. Some of my worst singing happens behind the wheel, and I mean that with pride. Anita Baker asks for a range I do not have and never will, yet I go for those notes anyway, red light after red light, sunroof cracked, grown fellas in the next lane pretending not to watch. Let them watch. What is the alternative? Sitting there stone faced as if a good time costs money I am unwilling to spend?

My father did none of this. I loved him, but the man wore his shoulders high and tight, braced for a wind that apparently would not let up. He worked. Then he worked some more. Whatever needed handling, he handled without a word about it. His laugh, on the rare day it surfaced, caught you off guard, because his face mostly stayed locked in that ready position, waiting on the next thing to go wrong.

So I dance. Badly. My knees file their complaints. The children find it deeply embarrassing, which is honestly a bonus. There is a specific move I do to Cameo that my daughter has begged me to retire, and her begging only makes me commit harder. That part comes with time. 40 years old in her own kitchen, some ancient record will find her. Her body will move before her mind grants permission. She will finally understand why the embarrassing dad had a point.

We discuss healing a lot now, and I am glad we do. Therapy, boundaries, rest, all of it. Good. Necessary. Yet somewhere in the seriousness of getting well, I worry we forgot that delight is medicine too. Not the deep sort that fixes the root. A shallower version. The kind that carries you through a rough Tuesday. A good bassline can hold a brother up on a bad afternoon. Cheaper than most remedies, and it has not once judged me for how I looked while receiving it.

Here is what I have come to believe. A brother who protects his peace also has to protect his pleasure, and those are not the same job. Peace is a quiet thing. Pleasure arrives loud. One is the deep breath at the end of a long shift. The other is Earth, Wind & Fire coming on at a cookout while 40 people who planned nothing suddenly move in the same direction. You need both. The world hands out endless reasons to sit still and stay guarded. It rarely offers you a reason to get up and shake something loose. That part you supply yourself, or it does not get supplied.

I keep a short list of songs for the hard days. The whole thing stays private, but I will tell you the opener belongs to The Isleys, and it has never failed me. Not once. Grief could not stop it. No layoff has managed to. Even a rough phone call from a doctor lost that fight. I press play, and for 4 minutes I am a person again instead of a problem being managed.

Maybe that sounds small to you. Perhaps you expected weightier material, given who is writing and what folks my age usually put on the page. Yet I have decided our lightness deserves defending as fiercely as anything else we claim. Give us mornings that open with a song instead of dread. We should get to sound terrible in traffic and feel wonderful doing it. Every brother alive has a claim on being caught mid step by the people who love him, then on keeping right along without apology.

So play the old album. Play it loud. Spin it on a random weekend for no reason a professional would ever sign off on. Let the speakers do what they were built to do, which is remind a tired brother that he is present, still moving, still, underneath everything the world stacks on his back, wide open to a little happiness.

That is no distraction from the struggle. It is the reward for surviving it.

Staff Writer; Lee Walker

This brother is a fitness trainer with 12 years of experience, focused on building strength, clarity, and real health within the Black community. Through his writing, Mr. Walker hopes to uplift younger Black men and men in general through honest conversations about fitness, financial pressure, fatherhood, discipline, mental wellness, and the importance of brotherhood.

Have questions? Reach me at LeeW@ThyBlackMan.com.

I have lived long enough to watch good men get sorted into piles by folks who never sat at their table. Some clerk in a campaign office, a strategist with a spreadsheet, decides that the fellow across the street belongs to the other tribe now, and just like that a friendship of thirty years is supposed to cool. I refuse it. You should too.

Let me tell you what nobody running for office will admit out loud. They need us divided. A united bloc of Black voters who talk to one another, who share resources across the aisle, who compare notes at the barbershop instead of shouting past each other on the internet, that is a nightmare for any campaign built on fear. Fear is the product. They sell it wholesale every October and hope we buy retail. Watch 2026 run that worn script one more time, the money landing early, the warnings turning shrill about how those people are coming for everything you hold dear.

Back when I was coming up, my father worked beside a man he disagreed with on nearly everything. Politics, church doctrine, how to raise a boy, they argued about all of it on the porch. But when my father’s car died in the middle of a January freeze, that same fellow drove twenty miles before sunrise to jump the battery. Nobody asked how he voted. That is what kinship looked like where I come from. The bond was never a poll. It was a promise.

Now watch how the game runs today. A young brother posts something you find foolish, and before you even finish reading it you have filed him under enemy. You have never met his mother. He might be pulling two jobs. On Saturdays he coaches a Pop Warner squad full of boys who are not even his, then drives home and reads his own girl to sleep. All you really have is a tag some stranger pinned on him, and you have worn it for him ever since, no questions asked.

Here is the hard part, and I say it with love. Both crews are guilty of the same trick. The blue side tells you that any Black man who leans right has lost his soul. Meanwhile the red side whispers that the ones who lean left are sheep who cannot think for themselves. Neither crowd wants you to notice that they are running the identical play from opposite sidelines. Keep him angry at his own reflection and he will never ask why his neighborhood still looks the way it does after 50 years of promises from both.

Some bonds outlast every argument, and you never know it until the day it counts. I learned that at a funeral, of all places. Two men who had not traded a word in ten years ended up in the same pew, close enough to touch, both of them wrecked, because the one in the box had loved the pair of them and never made either choose. Whatever they had been fighting about did not survive the room. Death does not check registration.

So let me be plain about what I am asking. When a fellow needs a job and you have the power to hire, hire him if he can do the work, and let the ballot he cast stay his own business. A boy on your block with no father steering him deserves a mentor, and you can be that even if his uncle wears a hat you cannot stand. Somebody stumbles in front of you, reach down and help him up. Argue with him later, once he is back on his feet, if there is any argument left worth having.

I am not telling you to abandon your convictions. Lord knows I have mine, and I will argue them until my last breath. Conviction is good. A man without a spine is no use to anybody. What I am warning against is letting a political machine monetize your idea of who deserves your loyalty. Campaigns, parties, and their allies will spend billions trying to convince you that your cousin is the threat. Meanwhile, plenty of the people writing those checks move in the same elite circles regardless of party. The division is for us. Not for them.

Think about the elders who built the road we walk. Did they screen the marchers by ideology before locking arms on that bridge? They came from churches, neighborhoods, activist groups, and every walk of life. They did not agree about everything, but they still marched together because the goal towered over any single opinion. We inherited that road. Now we hand a quick television ad the power to decide we cannot share a sidewalk.

There is a cost to all this sorting, and our sons are paying it. A boy watches his father cut off an old friend over a yard sign, and he learns that people are disposable. He learns that belonging is conditional, that love comes with a questionnaire. Then we wonder why the young ones feel so alone, why they trust nobody, why they build walls before they build anything worth keeping. We taught them that. And we can teach them something better.

I want you to try something this week. Call up somebody you have written off. Not to argue, not to win, just to check on him. Ask about his knees, his mama, his job. You will remember, somewhere in that conversation, that he is not a party. He is a person you once knew, made of the same clay, carrying the same weight in a country that never made any of it easy for either of you.

The powerful stay powerful by keeping the rest of us fighting over scraps and symbols. That is the oldest arrangement there is. Our answer cannot be to sort harder. It has to be refusal. We hold the line on who belongs to us, no matter how loud the noise gets in the season when they need our anger most.

Nobody in Washington gets to hand out your kinfolk like campaign buttons. You decide who your people are. That was always your call. Do not let a stranger with a fundraising quota tell you otherwise.

Staff Writer; L.L. McKenna

Politics explained through the lens of justice and equity. Offering perspective that informs, challenges, and empowers.

One can contact this brother at; LLMcKenna@ThyBlackMan.com.

I watched the whole circus with a different set of eyes.

Some of that comes with age. Once you have lived long enough to see how grown men come apart, you stop finding the earnest ones so hilarious. I have buried friends who were cooler than Russ ever tried to be. And I have watched slick talkers with all the right one liners lose their families, their money, and eventually themselves. Nobody clipped their bad decisions and set them to funny music. The quiet ruin of a so called real one rarely trends.

So let me say the thing plainly. The corniness people mocked was never the flaw they pretended it was.

Think about what the ridicule was actually built on. Peel it back and you find a television routine, a slogan or two, a husband who bragged on his wife instead of stepping out on her, and a father figure who embraced his stepson and treated him like his own. Somewhere along the way we got these categories twisted. We started treating polish like weakness and treating chaos as authenticity. This culture will crown a brother who cusses out reporters and picks up DUIs while his marriage quietly falls apart. Then the guy who spends his time supporting families and sitting with sick kids at the hospital, him we decide is lame.

That math has bugged me for a long time.

Look at the actual record, not the memes. Across 14 NFL seasons, there were no publicly reported arrests attached to his name. Nobody leaked footage of him swinging on somebody in an elevator. There was no baby mama drama splashed across the blogs, no sideline meltdown that torched a career. He weathered the end of his Seattle run, getting benched and released in Denver, Pittsburgh moving on after one season, and the Giants turning to a rookie after three starts. Through all of it he stayed professional. In the press he kept his mouth clean. He did not go scorched earth on his old teammates on the way out. Knock the throws however you want. Off the field he was not a locker room problem, and he did not hand anybody an off-field reason to regret his signature.

We ought to sit with how rare that truly is.

I coach a little on weekends, youth ball, nothing serious. Those boys hear the same thing out of me every season. The world will hand you a hundred reasons to be angry and only a few reasons to stay steady. Anger is the easier road. It gets the laughs, draws the followers, and reads to everybody like it is keeping things a hundred. Steady looks boring from the outside. It reads as corny. Yet steady is what keeps a household together when the money gets tight and the phone stops ringing.

Here is what the jokes always missed. It takes real backbone to keep showing up as the same person after the crowd turns on you. When his time in Seattle ended, Russ could have gotten bitter and loud. Once things collapsed in Denver, he could have leaked his frustrations and played the victim on any podcast that would book him. Plenty of former stars have taken exactly that route. He chose to keep his family intact, keep his charity work going, and hold his composure while grown professionals openly mocked his contract. Say what you want. That is discipline most of us could not muster with cameras in our faces.

I return again to the family piece because that is where the double standard gets loudest. When a certain kind of athlete flexes his relationship, we swoon and call it love. Let Wilson do the exact same thing and we roll our eyes and call it performance. Why? What did all that scrutiny of that man’s marriage reveal except a husband who genuinely enjoys being a husband? He stepped into a ready made family and treated his stepson like his own blood. In a community that spends a whole lot of breath talking about absent fathers, we sure did give a hard time to a brother who volunteered to be present.

Somewhere our compass got demagnetized.

I am not here to canonize anybody. He fumbled real football moments. On the field he made choices that fans had every right to critique, and the money he was paid invited scrutiny. Criticize the play. Debate the deep ball and the sacks and the price tag. That is the fair game part. What I refuse to accept is the idea that his decency itself was a defect, that his refusal to self destruct made him less of a man than the wreckers we love to celebrate.

Let me tell you who my father was. A quiet cat who went to work, came home, kept his word, and not once put my mother in the position to explain his mess to the neighbors. Nobody made a viral clip out of him either. No one ever will. That kind of steadiness does not go viral, and that is precisely the sickness in how we measure worth now. We reward the spectacle and yawn at the substance.

Young brothers are watching this closely. They are learning, from the way we hand out our respect, that loud dysfunction earns more love than quiet reliability. The lesson sinking in is that a wild man is interesting and a faithful one is a joke. We are raising a whole generation to believe that being good is the same as being weak, and I promise you the bill for that lesson comes due.

More of us need to move like number three moved, and I say that without a trace of irony. Forget the slogans and the branding for a second. I mean the core of it. Handle your business. Protect your household. Serve the folks around you. Lose without becoming a bitter, blaming mess about it. Stay clear of the kind of trouble that follows a name around for years. If that reads as corny in this era, then maybe corny is exactly the medicine we have been avoiding.

I would rather my son grow up dull and dependable than exciting and gone. Better he be the punchline in some comedian’s bit than the cautionary tale at somebody’s funeral. Give me the water metaphors and the goofy optimism all day long over the smooth operator who leaves a trail of wreckage behind his charisma.

The people who laughed were never really laughing at a flaw. They were laughing at a mirror, at a standard most of them will never meet. Russell Wilson kept his family, his dignity, and his integrity through the public unraveling of the final stretch of his playing career. Go ahead and call that corny. Some of us just call it a whole man.

Staff Writer; J.G. Lacour

Covering the NBA, NFL, college basketball, college football, and Major League Baseball from a Black man’s perspective. He loves the full world of sports, but the NFL remains his favorite.

Need to contact this bro, feel free to use this email address; JGLacour@ThyBlackMan.com.

My cousin Reggie turned forty eight in March. He came to his own party in a basketball jersey with another man’s name across the back, pulled over an extra large Ralph Lauren polo on a body that has been a medium since Clinton was in office. Not vintage. Not ironic. Bought brand new, both pieces. The fitted cap sat stiff as cardboard, brim flat, the sticker still shining on the side, never once peeled. His wife smiled the way a woman smiles when she surrendered that argument a decade ago.

I didn’t say a word. I ate, laughed at the stories we always tell, and drove home. But the whole ride down 85 I kept thinking about how many of us are walking around dressed as a photograph of somebody we used to be.

You know the look. Maybe you are the look. Jeans pooling at the ankle because they were bought for a silhouette that stopped making sense fifteen years ago. A hoodie big enough to smuggle groceries. Nike Air Force 1s so white they announce you before your voice does. Underneath all that fabric is a grown man with a mortgage, a bad knee, a daughter in her second year at NC A&T (HBCU pride), and a job where people call him sir.

Before you get hot, understand this is not an argument for khakis. I am not asking you to go quietly into some beige retirement of the spirit. But the clothes you keep reaching for are not neutral. They are a message, and the one a lot of us are sending, without ever meaning to, is that we are still negotiating with a man who left the building a long time ago.

The oversized fit was never only about fashion. For some of us, it also felt like protection. Baggy meant you couldn’t be read too easily. Baggy meant your body stayed your own business. It meant hand me downs, or a mama buying two sizes up so you could grow into them whether you wanted to or not. There was love in that, and survival too. But the armor never came off, and now brothers in their fifties are dressed for a fight nobody is trying to have with them.

We get permission to stay stuck, too, from the men modeling manhood on our screens. Many of the rappers we came up on are pushing fifty, well into their fifties, or closing in on sixty, still wearing versions of the same uniform they wore when we were in high school. Grandfathers in skinny jeans. Men with grown children hopping around a stage in shorts and a chain heavy enough to require a chiropractor.

Understand the business they are in, though. Those men are selling a memory. Their livelihood depends on you and me staring up there and feeling nineteen again, because nineteen is what we bought the ticket for. It is a costume with a payroll behind it, propped up by a trainer, a surgeon, and a lighting man who knows where to stand. Nobody is paying you to stay frozen. No tour, no camera, no crowd chanting for the man you were in 1998. What you have is a whole life you built, and it deserves to be dressed like it happened.

The hair tells on us worse than the clothes. Too many good men sit in that chair and ask the barber to draw a line where the hairline used to live. Half an inch of another man’s youth sharpied on, sitting up there like a fence around an empty lot. Everybody sees it. The barber takes your money on account of his light bill. Coworkers say nothing because they are polite. Your kids see it too, and they are cracking up in the group chat.

Same with the dye. A flat black beard against a face that has clearly done some living never once read as young to anybody. It reads as anxious. No woman alive ever saw a shoe polish beard and thought, my goodness, look at that vitality.

The gray is not your enemy. The gray is the receipt. Two recessions, a divorce maybe, a parent you buried, a child you raised, a pile of mornings when you got up and went anyway. And you want to cover that? Man, wear it. Let it come in silver at the temples and watch how rooms respond to you.

Now the practical part, where most of us are losing without knowing we’re in a game. Fit is not size. Size is a number printed inside a collar by a company that has never met you. Fit is how cloth relates to your actual shoulders, your actual chest, that stomach you have been meaning to address since 2019. A man in a thirty dollar shirt that fits beats a man in a two hundred dollar shirt that doesn’t, in every room, on every day of the week.

The tailor is the cheat code and hardly anybody in our circle uses him. Depending on the garment and where you live, a basic hem might cost twenty or thirty dollars. Taking in a waist may cost a little more, but either alteration can completely change how the clothes sit on your body. I have watched brothers keep a fresh pair of Air Force 1s coming every couple of months, box after box, toothbrush and cleaner on the kitchen counter, then refuse to spend a little money getting a blazer to close over their chest.

And listen, I understand the pull. There is grief in that closet. Those clothes are evidence that you were twenty six once, that your knees worked, that women watched you cross a room in a way you have not felt in years. Bagging it up for Goodwill feels like admitting something.

But you are not admitting defeat. You are admitting arrival. The difference between those two is enormous.

Think about the men we came up under. My granddaddy worked a loading dock and owned two suits, a gray and a navy, both pressed, both fitting him like the fabric had been grown on his body. He put on a hat to go to the store. Not a cap. A hat. He was not rich, not educated, not what anybody would call handsome. But when that man walked into a room, people rearranged themselves around him. Looking young never crossed his mind. He was trying to look like a man who had somewhere to be and somebody depending on him, which is exactly what he was.

That is what we lost. Not style, we have plenty of that. What went missing was the idea that growing older is itself a look, carrying its own authority. Somewhere we decided the only options after thirty five were to freeze the clock or disappear into a polo shirt, and neither one is living.

So start with clothes that admit you have a body instead of pretending otherwise. Cut close enough to show a shape, easy enough to breathe in. Own fewer things and let them be better made. Three pairs of pants you love will beat nine you tolerate. Learn what certain colors do against your skin. Buy a real coat. Shine your shoes, or pay a man to do it while you read the paper at your leisure.

None of this requires erasing where you came from. Keep a piece or two from the old days. The jersey your uncle gave you can stay in the rotation. Wear it to the cookout. Just not to your daughter’s graduation, and never because you are scared of what’s standing underneath it.

Here is the part nobody told us growing up, so let me say it plainly. It is okay to want to look good. A man is allowed to enjoy the sight of himself in a mirror. Somewhere in the water we drank, vanity got confused with softness, and brothers started treating pride in their appearance as something to apologize for or hide behind a joke.

Ask yourself who benefits from that.

Take the extra ten minutes. Iron the shirt. Buy the cologne you keep smelling on other men and putting back on the shelf. Catch your reflection in a storefront window and think, alright now. That is not arrogance. That is a man on good terms with himself, and it shows up in how you walk into a meeting, how you greet your neighbor, how your wife looks at you across a table she assumed would be an ordinary Tuesday. Your children read it too. They learn what a grown man thinks he is worth by watching what he puts on his back.

Consider what you came through. Rooms full of people who underestimated you. Years that would have folded a lesser man. All of it lives in your face now, in your walk, in a way of speaking that took thirty years to earn. Put on something that agrees with that.

The young man you were is not gone. He is just done leading. Let him ride in the passenger seat where he belongs, and get behind the wheel looking like the man you actually became.

Staff Writer; Mark Brooks

This brother writes about faith, money, brotherhood, and the real work of being a man from one day to the next… He keeps it plain, with his attention on home, community, and helping brothers do a little better…

Contact him at MarkB@ThyBlackMan.com.

I never could bring myself to nod with them. Something in the verdict sat crooked in my chest, though I will admit it took a long stretch of years before I understood exactly what.

There is a certain notion of what a brother is supposed to be, and it gets passed down like an heirloom nobody remembers buying. He is meant to be granite. Unbothered. A little dangerous, or willing at least to look the part. The face stays still. Tears do not fall where folks can witness them, love does not get spoken aloud, and Lord knows a real one does not sit on camera talking about faith, and gratitude, and drinking his water and guarding his recovery. To plenty of us, that kind of living looked like a get-up. Like a performance staged for a camera owned by other people.

Here is what I have finally come to understand about the granite, though. It was never vanity. It was survival.

My father wore it. His father wore it deeper. Both came up in a place that punished tenderness in men who looked like them, a country that read a smile as weakness and gentleness as an opening. So the wall went up. Hurt got swallowed. Softness got answered with a set jaw, because the world outside that door was hunting for any reason. The pose kept them breathing. I will not sit here and mock what kept a whole generation alive.

The trouble is what came after. We took the shield and started bowing to it. We forgot it was only ever a shield. Somewhere along the road the armor stopped being protection and became the entire definition, until a young brother who refused to strap it on could look, to the wrong set of eyes, like a counterfeit.

That is the room Russell walked into.

He came grinning about possibility. Why not you, he kept telling children and telling himself. And a hope that plain made people suspicious. We have been sold so many bright teeth over the years that a real smile now reads as a hustle. When the quarterback spoke about faith, folks rolled their eyes and called it a brand. When he loved his wife openly, lifted her up in front of the entire world, some cackled and questioned the man’s spine, as though devotion were a thing to be ashamed of. He did not run the streets. He did not drink himself sideways. He guarded his health and his body like they were worth guarding. And for all of it, the verdict came down quick. Corny. Fake. Not really one of us.

Sit with how strange that arithmetic is. We had reached a place where clean living, and open affection, and a fella saying he believed in something larger than himself became the evidence used against him.

Now, I am not handing you a saint. Russell is a whole person, with the ego and the misjudgments and the odd business venture any of us would have carried. Seattle grew tired of him and he grew tired of Seattle, and there is history in that split that has nothing to do with our subject here. I am not composing a hymn to the athlete. He is a door, and I want to walk you through it into the wider room waiting on the other side.

Because the true matter was never one player. It is the narrow little box we built around ourselves and then had the nerve to call freedom.

Consider all the men who never got to be gentle. Who had jokes but were not permitted grief. Who could dance but could not tremble. Fellas who buried three friends before thirty and were told, by their own people, to keep it moving, hold the face flat, do not let anybody catch the water in your eyes. We handed each other that instruction like it was affection. Maybe, once, it was. But plenty of good souls died lonely inside it, cradling a whole ocean they were never allowed to pour out.

What truly unsettled folks about Russell, I have come to believe, is that he declined the audition. He would not act out the hardness for their comfort. He was optimistic in front of a people trained to distrust hope. He was warm in front of a people taught that warmth gets you played. He prayed aloud in a culture that had learned to keep the Lord inside the building and off the field. And every single time he did it without shame, he was quietly posing a question a lot of us were not ready to face. Who told you that you had to be stone. And who profits from you believing it.

I think about the boys watching. Always studying, always sorting out what a grown one is permitted to be. A son reads his father for the list of what is allowed, and if the only item on that list is grit, then grit is the whole inheritance he receives. A cramped inheritance. He hands the same tight little will down to his own, and the ocean gets buried one more generation deep.

So when I hear that a brother proved he owes no one a show of toughness, I do not receive it as an insult to strength. I have known powerful men my entire life. My grandfather could break a chain and hum a spiritual while he did it. Real fortitude was never the enemy. The enemy is the imitation, the pose we mistook for the person, the shield we knelt before so long that we could no longer tell it apart from our own faces.

Optimism is not softness. Loving your wife where everyone can see is not softness. Faith is not a costume, rest is not laziness, and a grown one weeping at a funeral is not less of what he is. None of that should sound daring. It only sounds daring because we let a stingy definition wear the crown for far too many years.

I wish somebody had told my uncle that, back in the shop, before he waved off that grinning young quarterback. I wish somebody had told my daddy he was allowed to set the wall down sometimes. That the door had been unlatched for years, and he could have stepped out into the evening air and simply felt something without first checking who was looking.

We do not always get to repair the past. But we do get to loosen our grip on what follows it.

A grown one can be tender and still be whole. He can hope in broad daylight and mean every word. He can believe, and love out loud, and keep himself well, and not a single ounce of his manhood goes missing in the exchange. Russell did not invent that truth. He simply stood in front of the cameras and lived it plainly, long enough that even the stubborn old heads in my shop finally had to set down their laughter and listen.

And that, when you get all the way down to it, may be the bravest thing any of us ever does.

Staff Writer; L.L. McKenna

Politics explained through the lens of justice and equity. Offering perspective that informs, challenges, and empowers.

One can contact this brother at; LLMcKenna@ThyBlackMan.com.

He was a wide receiver who ran routes for Southwest Mississippi Community College after starring at his hometown high school. On the Fourth of July he rode out to Horn Island with a group of friends to celebrate. That place sits off the Gulf coast, a barrier island you can only reach by private boat. But he never came home on the vessel that carried him there. Days later a park ranger found his body in the water at the northwest tip of that shoreline.

Now his loved ones are asking what happened, and they have every right to ask.

I will say that part plainly, because I mean it. If that were my grandson lying in a state medical examiner’s lab, waiting on toxicology that will take weeks, I would need to know every single thing. Who saw him last. Why the boat left while he was still ashore. Why his phone stayed behind on that vessel. How much time slipped past before somebody picked up a telephone and told the authorities a child was missing. Those are fair things to ask. A mother named Christine Wonsley is owed that much, and a great deal more.

But I have lived long enough to watch this same story unfold too many times, and I mean to talk with you about the difference between chasing the truth and manufacturing it.

Right now the internet is on fire. The boy was the only Black face in a group of white companions. A video circulating online has fueled speculation about an apparent confrontation on the beach, though authorities have not publicly established exactly what the clip shows or how it relates to Nolan’s death. Their names are being passed around like a wanted poster by people who were nowhere near that sand, writing whole paragraphs about what took place out there in the dark as if they had stood right beside him.

I understand the fear underneath all of it. I carry it too. Any Black man my age can tell you why a young brother alone among white boys in the Deep South sets our nerves on edge. History handed us that instinct, and history earned it. When the writer Ibram Kendi reminds us not to blame this child for going where he felt welcome, I hear him clear. The reflex to say he should have known better is its own quiet poison, and I will have no part of it.

Still, I keep hearing the grandfather’s own words in my head. Christopher Wells posted on Facebook, and in the middle of all his grief he wrote something wise. He said there had been enough finger pointing, and asked everyone to let law enforcement do its job while his kin got room to breathe and mourn. That is a man aching for the truth, telling us plain that the truth is not the same creature as a hunch typed at midnight.

Because here is what we actually know, as opposed to what we feel. The Jackson County sheriff, John Ledbetter, has said his office has no information that a crime occurred. Investigators suspect the young man drowned, though they are still working the case and calling it open. Ledbetter has also said the current understanding is that Nolan chose to remain on the island because he expected to ride back to the mainland with someone else. Witnesses who claim there was a shouting match that evening say the arguing was among the group itself, nothing confirmed beyond that. An autopsy was done. The toxicology is pending. None of that shuts the door on hard questions, and it should not. But none of it hands anybody license to brand a teenager a killer on the strength of a blurry clip and a locked account.

Here is the heart of it, put as directly as I can. At this hour, nobody standing outside that investigation truly knows what happened to that boy. Not you, not me, not the loudest account on the timeline. The young men who rode out there with him have not been charged with anything, and the sheriff has said they are cooperating with investigators. Maybe what surfaces later will trouble them. Maybe it will clear them completely. Either way, that reckoning belongs to evidence and to time, not to a crowd deciding tonight. So be patient. Hold your judgment. Those are somebody’s children too, and no mother among them should be reading her son’s name typed beside the word guilty before a single finding has been made.

I have seen what gossip does. It does not comfort the grieving. Instead it hands them a false target, and then when reality arrives and that target turns out to be wrong, the real wound is still sitting there, only now it is wrapped in shame and confusion and lawyers. Meanwhile the honest answer, whatever it proves to be, gets harder to find through all the noise we made chasing it.

The family has retained the attorney Ben Crump, a name most of us recognize. His statement did not accuse a single soul. It called for a thorough and transparent inquiry, and said they will not rest until every fact about what happened out there is brought into the light. Read those words again. Every fact. Into the light. That is the correct demand. That is the grown demand. It puts the weight where it belongs, on the ones whose job is to find out, and it insists they do that job in the open, where the rest of us can watch.

So what is it I am after, as an old man who has buried more than a few friends and read far too many stories shaped like this one?

I want the sheriff’s office to treat this exactly the way they promised, like any other case, and to be as thorough as the day is long. That toxicology needs to be handled properly and its findings shared with his kin honestly, not leaked out in fragments. Investigators should sit down with every soul who stood on that beach and explain, in plain language, why a group of young folks came back to the mainland without one of their own. That video ought to be examined by professionals trained to examine video, not by ten thousand strangers hunting for a face to hate.

We in the watching public need to sit with something uncomfortable. We can lift this household up without staging a trial. We can demand accountability without appointing ourselves the jury. Those two things do not cancel out. They only feel like they do because grief is impatient, and the phone in our hand rewards the loudest guess.

That young man loved people. His best friend recalled that Nolan told him he loved him in a brotherly way after they arrived on the island. Coaches called him humble. The college president called him well respected. His mama called him a special soul and said the good Lord took extra time in the making of him. A community that never met him has already poured well over a hundred thousand dollars into helping lay him to rest. Somebody who moved that gently through the world deserves better than to become raw material for our darkest suspicions before the facts have even walked in the door.

Nolan is owed the light. So are the ones who raised him. That whole long history that trains us to fear the worst is owed, for once, an answer built from evidence instead of one built from noise.

So let us ask our hard questions, loudly and without apology, and keep the heat on until every fact stands in the open. But the verdict belongs to what can be proven, not to us. Give that grieving mother the one thing the rumors never could. Something solid. Something real.

Until then I am praying for Ocean Springs, and I am waiting, the way his family is waiting, for the kind of answers that are actually worth the name.

Staff Writer; Lee Walker

This brother is a fitness trainer with 12 years of experience, focused on building strength, clarity, and real health within the Black community. Through his writing, Mr. Walker hopes to uplift younger Black men and men in general through honest conversations about fitness, financial pressure, fatherhood, discipline, mental wellness, and the importance of brotherhood.

Have questions? Reach me at LeeW@ThyBlackMan.com.