How does Boston address a decades-long racial injustice?
How do you heal an open wound that’s been festering for 34 years?
Or maybe 400 years, to count another way. For this unhealed scar is as old as this town.
One way to start is where Mayor Michelle Wu did Wednesday, surrounded by victims of the Charles Stuart murder case as she attempted to address precisely those questions, and to atone.
Prompted by the Globe’s re-investigation of the case — an undertaking produced in partnership with HBO — Wu issued something none of her predecessors had been able to muster: an eloquent, full-throated apology to Willie Bennett and Alan Swanson, the men wrongfully identified as suspects in the killing.
“What was done to you was unjust, unfair, racist, and wrong and this apology is long overdue,” Wu said to a packed room in City Hall, as Swanson and the Bennett family stood behind her. “To every Black resident — I am sorry not only for the abuse our city enacted, but for the beliefs and the bias that brought them to bear.”
The Stuart murder was one of the most notorious crimes in the city’s history. On Oct. 23, 1989, Charles Stuart called 911 to report a shooting. He claimed that — moments after he and his wife, Carol, left a birthing class at Brigham and Women’s Hospital — a Black man jumped into their car, forced them to drive to Mission Hill, and robbed and shot them. The Stuarts were white; Mission Hill was predominantly Black and brown.
Carol Stuart died hours after the shooting, after giving birth to a son, Christopher, who survived a mere 17 days. Charles Stuart, badly wounded, survived.
Police responded to the crime by laying siege to Mission Hill in a search for the made-up Black gunman. Among other outrages, they searched Black and brown men, many of them outside the Tobin Community Center — the heartbeat of the Mission Hill community.
By the time Stuart’s story unraveled the following January — culminating in his suicidal jump off the Tobin Bridge — thousands of Black residents had been subjected to terror and trauma that have never gone away.
(The Globe has produced an eight-part series along with a nine-part podcast: “Murder In Boston” as well as collaborating on an HBO documentary with the same title. I was part of the reporting team and host the podcast.)
The raw emotion this case still prompts ran throughout Wu’s announcement event Wednesday. Willie Bennett’s family and Alan Swanson stood behind her, vindicated at last. Speakers such as former city councilor Tito Jackson — himself searched and frisked as a teenager, at the height of the hysteria after the murder — choked back tears as they tried to capture what this moment meant to them.
“Today is not about politics,” Jackson said. “It’s about righteousness, truth, and healing.”
Wu deserves credit for confronting the issue head-on. Not least because this is a story Boston immediately did its level best to forget and diminish. The message from Boston’s civic leadership back then was basically, let’s move on. Mayor Raymond Flynn, elected as a racial healer, stopped talking about it as soon as possible.
Easy for them. Impossible for Boston.
It shouldn’t be lost on any of us that the first elected mayor of color and the city’s Black police commissioner, Michael Cox, were apologizing for the sins of white predecessors from a generation ago.
People then may have wanted to move on, but moving on has never been possible for the Bennetts, or for Swanson, or for many others whose stories have been largely ignored until now.
Bennett’s family eventually received an insulting $12,500 settlement from the city, along with the barest of apologies from Flynn. Swanson didn’t even get that.
“There is no world in which a piece of paper undoes the harm of this part of our history, but it is my hope that you will accept this letter of apology as a step toward accountability for the damage done by our City,” Wu said. “If nothing else, please take this as evidence of our ongoing determination to build the Boston our Black residents deserve.”
But Wu’s gesture, however gracious, doesn’t answer the question that still hangs out there: What does justice look like now?
Leslie Harris, who represented Swanson, said apologies are due from all of Boston, from City Hall to the Police Department to the media, including the Globe, that covered the case. He also called for reparations for the Bennetts and for Swanson. (Indeed, when I asked Alan Swanson what the day meant to him, he said: “I’m still broke.”) That plea was echoed by other speakers as well.
Louis Elisa, NAACP president during the racial storm the Stuart murder unleashed, said real justice would mean addressing the ills that continue to plague Black Boston, starting with the public schools.
During our team’s two years of reporting for the recent series and podcast, we kept returning to the question of whether something like the Stuart case could happen today.
And an uncomfortable truth is that Stuart’s lie was believed because people — white people — were conditioned to believe it.
As Wu put it: “At every level and at every opportunity, those in power closed their eyes to the truth because the lie felt familiar. They saw the story they wanted to see.”
Who’s to say that couldn’t happen now?
But Wu’s apology told a different story Wednesday, a story of a city that’s changed. A Boston in which Michelle Wu can be mayor is not the Boston of 1989.
But this is no time for congratulations. The hard work of reconciliation has barely begun.
Correction: Because of a reporting error, a previous version of this column misidentified Michael Cox as Boston’s first Black police commissioner. The Globe regrets the error.
Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at adrian.walker@globe.com. Follow him @Adrian_Walker.