Norvell Campbell

Norvell Campbell, a 61-year-old Black man from Memphis, Tennessee, is remembered today through the painful simplicity of what is known: his life was taken in a homicide, and the rest of the story—how it happened, why it happened, who did it—has been left hanging in the air like a question no one has been able to answer out loud.

There is a special kind of grief that follows a family when the details are scarce. It is grief without edges, without a clear beginning and end, the kind tha ...