If Only Boston Could Have Done the Right Thing

“Are we gonna live together? Together are we gonna live?” said Mister Señor Love Daddy, the local radio DJ portrayed by Samuel L Jackson in the 1989 film “Do the Right Thing.”

“Do the Right Thing” hit theater screens in 1989, the same year that Carol Stuart was brutally shot in the head in the passenger seat of her husband’s car in Boston. At first glance, these stories have little in common. But in retrospect, years of racially motivated tensions, poor policing and reporting, and a big city’s even bigger racist problems put these two stories on the same plane.

“Nightmare in Mission Mill” was released by the Boston Globe’s Spotlight Team in 2023, detailing the tumultuous murder and subsequent fallout that took place in the city in 1989 and early 1990. The team, led most notably by Globe columnist and associate editor Adrian Walker, retold the story of the Stuart murder in an 8-part written series, accompanied by a podcast and HBO documentary.

In brief summary, the story recounts the night that Carol Stuart and her husband Charles (Chuck) Stuart were shot inside their car in the Boston neighborhood of Mission Hill. The couple lived in the suburbs of the city and were in the neighborhood after leaving the nearby Brigham and Women’s hospital where they attended a birthing class, as Carol was pregnant.

Carol was shot in the head. Once the couple was located by the police, she was taken back to the hospital where she died. In an attempt to save the baby, a c-section procedure was performed but the child died 17 days later. As Chuck was being prepared for surgery to address his gunshot wounds, a detective asked who had committed the crime. Chuck uttered the words “Black man.”

In 1989 the city of Boston was recovering from a period of racially motivated violence and unrest sparked by attempts to racially integrate the school district. Roughly a decade had passed, but the wounds left on the city’s Black neighborhoods and communities were still fresh.

For months the Boston Police Department ripped through Mission Hill in search of a Black man who would match the vague description given by Chuck. Ultimately, they landed on William Bennett.

In The Boston Globe coverage from January of 1990, after the case had been closed, notorious commentator Mike Barnicle described Bennett as pitiful, and a sociopath. “The man’s pathetic, violent history is so much a part of the unyielding issues of race, crime and drugs tearing daily at America that it is amazing how any black minister or black politician could ever stand up and howl in public that his arrest was a product of police bigotry and a volley of discrimination aimed at all black residents of Boston,” wrote Mike Barnicle.

It turned out that Willie Bennett had nothing to do with the murder of Carol Stuart. Chuck was the one who shot her. He committed suicide on January 4, 1990, the day after a confidant went to the police with the incriminating information.

While the Boston Police Department’s actions are deplorable, the city’s dominant newspapers, The Boston Globe and the Boston Herald were equally complacent in the proliferation of the racist narrative that falsely accused Willie Bennett.

Missteps acknowledged by Walker in the series epilogue included dramatic sensationalizing, the proliferation of prejudiced narratives surrounding communities of color, and shameful overreliance on information supplied by the police. The city was caught, and exposed, for creating a guilty Black man out of thin air.

The media was also inexcusably caught in a painfully classic case of the overuse of anonymous sources in their coverage of the Stuart murder, leading them to irresponsible reporting based on rumor and assumption. “At issue for journalists are some enduring questions of how to fulfill their obligation to be both skeptical and sensitive, especially in reporting on so emotional and explosive a subject,” wrote Alex S. Jones in a January 1990 article for The New York Times. In an effort to publish the best, most juicy, and shocking stories before their competitors, the Globe and the Herald made a bad scenario worse.

The Globe Spotlight team took ownership of these mistakes. Through re-opening the story and correcting the record of what actually took place in the Stuart murder, these journalists take an admirable level of accountability for the role they and their colleagues played in harming the Mission Hill community. The most stunning revelation that appears in this series is the number of people who knew the truth about who shot Carol, but remained silent. The visual given by the line “By the time of Carol’s funeral, at least 11 people knew that Chuck was the killer — including two of the men who carried Carol’s casket,” evokes gut-wrenching emotion for the readers.

The reality of the Stuart case exposed in “Nightmare in Mission Hill” invoked many of the same grief I felt the same time I watched the film “Do the Right Thing.” Both stories present a big city, predominantly Black neighborhood in 1989 that is ripped apart by people who could not see the humanity in one another. In the end, Radio Raheem is murdered and Willie Bennett is imprisoned. Sal’s Pizzeria is destroyed and the DiMaiti family would never be the same. Bed-Stuy erupted, and Mission Hill was torn to shreds. The aftermath of each story leaves behind communities destroyed by systematic injustice and a neighborhood scarred by violence. In both cases, the communities must rebuild from the ashes of trauma, carrying with them the painful awareness that until there is reconciliation, these cycles will continue. But only one actually happened in 1989.