Ben Crump built a career demanding justice. Nolan Wells’ death has put his mission — and methods — back under a microscope

Ben Crump built a career demanding justice. Nolan Wells’ death has put his mission — and methods — back under a microscope

(CNN) — Ben Crump’s voice cut through the noise of a crowded convention hall like a thunderclap.

“Justice for Nolan Wells,” the attorney shouted late last month as he marched into the room with his fist thrust defiantly into the air. The crowd echoed his call: “Justice for Nolan Wells.”

As he made his way to the stage, Crump clasped the hand of Wells’ mother. In the weeks since her son died during a Fourth of July boating trip with friends, Christine Wells-Wonsley and her husband, Elmore, have become a fixture at the civil rights attorney’s side.

But this time, as they stood before a crowded room of journalists, they were not alone. Crump was flanked by three sets of grieving Black families who have all lost their sons in recent months.

The investigations into their children’s deaths have been fraught and flawed, they would later say. All three were 18 when they died. In all three cases, authorities have appeared to suggest their deaths were accidental.

And, crucially, Crump told reporters, all three died in “questionable” circumstances, surrounded by their White peers.

“We got to show that this is not a coincidence, that all these young 18-year-old Black men are ending up dead and nobody is being held accountable,” Crump said.

We “stand for the truth no matter who it implicates or who it exonerates. We stand for justice, no matter who it convicts or who it acquits.”

“And that’s all we want. We want answers.”

Time has shown where Ben Crump goes, the spotlight – and all the accompanying indignities it can bring — is sure to follow.

And his demand for answers has become a familiar refrain to anyone who’s followed the attorney’s rise to fame.

Crump made the same declaration when he represented the parents of Trayvon Martin in 2012, after the high school student was gunned down while visiting his father. He led the call for accountability in 2020 after Breonna Taylor was shot and killed by police. And he demanded justice again months later when George Floyd suffocated under an officer’s knee.

At the height of the Black Lives Matter protests that came to define that year, the Rev. Al Sharpton called Crump, “Black America’s attorney general” – and it’s a moniker Crump has since come to embrace.

“My job is to get justice for the families who trust me with their loss,” Crump recently told CNN in an email, “and that means telling the truth about what happened to them and the systemic failures behind it.”

With his signature North Carolina drawl and an Eagle of Justice pinned close to his heart, Crump has become one of the most visible civil rights attorneys in the nation.

But the same steadfast pursuit that’s placed the attorney at the center of nearly every call for racial justice in the past decade has earned Crump more than a few detractors.

And while his media blitz has successfully kept Nolan Wells’ name in the national dialogue, it’s also exposed Crump to a familiar criticism: that he’s stoking racial tension and somehow profiting from his clients’ pain.

His supporters say the condemnation is merely a sign of Crump’s skill. In a world that is all too willing to turn a blind eye to the crimes and injustices committed against Black America, they say the country needs someone like Ben Crump to bring them into sharper focus.

“He is the modern-day Thurgood Marshall,” Gerald Griggs, a fellow civil rights attorney and the former president of the Georgia NAACP, told CNN.

“We know that without the pressure and the attention of the media, many of these cases go unheard and unknown,” Griggs said. “That’s why I respect Attorney Crump and others who are doing this work, day in and day out.”

But proximity to such a polarizing figure can come at a cost.

Wells’ mother, a nurse practitioner, has become one of the latest grieving loved ones to be subjected to attacks and criticism online. In early August, Crump said the Mississippi Board of Nursing opened – and then quickly closed – a professional misconduct investigation into Wells-Wonsley after receiving a barrage of anonymous complaints following her son’s death.

“This is a warning shot at a grieving mother, meant to pressure and scare her into staying quiet,” Crump said after the inquiry was announced. She has been forced to defend her professional record simply for demanding clarity on what happened to her son, he added.

After the board closed the inquiry, Crump said, “It was frivolous, it was unfounded, and it was never about patient care.”

“What Christine still does not have is the truth about her son. We intend to get it.”

Trayvon Martin and the emergence of the Crump playbook

As Crump continues his search for the truth, attorneys representing three of the young men who were with Wells that day told CNN their clients have been inundated with false allegations and death threats since the case drew national attention.

“For these people on the outside to come in, in their slick suits, and tell us who we are and what we are, based on Mississippi’s history … That’s not us. That’s not what we believe,” attorney Tyler Cox told CNN.

“The truth of the matter is, we don’t know what happened to Nolan Wells. We had nothing to do with his death.”

“We’re telling the truth and if you continue to lie about these young men – and those lies are harmful to those young men – you will be sued in a court of law,” Cox said.

Although the attorneys declined to say whether they plan to sue Crump, he has previously dismissed any threats of defamation as a “distraction.”

But the attorney’s tendency to blend legal advocacy with public pressure campaigns has drawn lawsuits before, including in one of his earliest cases in the national spotlight: the killing of Trayvon Martin.

In February 2012, Trayvon, an unarmed Black teen, was shot and killed while walking home from a convenience store, by George Zimmerman, a volunteer with a neighborhood watch in Sanford, Florida.

Police questioned Zimmerman and later released him under the state’s controversial “Stand Your Ground” law. Frustrated by the lack of charges in their son’s death, Trayvon’s parents, Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, hired the Parks and Crump law firm to represent them.

Crump immediately launched a playbook he would hone over the years – holding a series of news conferences and making the rounds with news outlets to call for the release of the 911 tapes around the 17-year-old’s killing.

The media campaign elevated Trayvon’s death in the nation’s consciousness; a special prosecutor was appointed to oversee the case, and Zimmerman was indicted and arrested.

Trayvon was a catalyst for the early Black Lives Matter movement. And Zimmerman’s trial became a lightning rod for race relations across America.

But days after a Florida jury declared Zimmerman not guilty of murder, his brother, Robert, told CNN he felt Crump and his team were “injecting race into things” and that “crafty attorneys got away with fabricating a completely scripted narrative and selling it to the American people through the media.”

In 2019, George Zimmerman sued Crump and Martin’s parents alleging conspiracy and defamation. At the time, Crump and Trayvon’s family issued a joint statement calling the lawsuit “another failed attempt to defend the indefensible and a shameless attempt to profit off the lives and grief of others.” Three years later, a judge dismissed the case.

‘Holding America to its promise’

But Crump’s most vocal critics have continued to levy similar allegations of “race profiteering” and defamation, and his calls for justice have often put him at odds with state officials leading investigations.

“I’ve been dealing with Mr. Crump for five years on different cases in Mississippi, and you know, I don’t put a lot of credence in what he says,” Sean Tindell, commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, recently told CNN.

“I don’t think that he is down here for justice