Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | December 6, 2023
The City of Boston gets a lot of grief, rightfully, for being one of America’s most racist cities, something even I could sense after moving there from Arkansas. The South is racist, but the racism in Boston is of an entirely different nature.
I am one of the millions of Boston transients who move to the city to go to school, stick around for a few years, and eventually leave for the suburbs, go back home, or move elsewhere. We were not the problem; we are why Boston is known as an affluent, highly educated, liberal city. The problem, with all due respect (not really), are the townies. The problem is Southie and Charlestown; the problem is all those people you see in Good Will Hunting or Dennis Lehane movies.
Boston is a weird city broken into neighborhoods. The students live in Alston/Brighton; the rich people live downtown; Black people live in Roxbury and Dorchester; LGTBQ people live in the South End (and now Jamaica Plain), and the blue-collar white people live in Southie and Charlestown. I’m sure it’s improved since I left (I’m actually not sure of that at all), but back in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, the city was segregated mainly by neighborhood.
Except for going to work, most folks stayed in their neighborhoods. That would change with desegregation and busing, which would usher in an era of racial resentment and violence, which only seemed to calm when Ray Flynn was elected mayor in 1984 to unite the races. And then, in 1989, came Chuck and Carol Stuart, the subjects of Max’s Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage, & Reckoning.
I lived in Boston for nearly a decade and had never heard of Chuck and Carol Stuart, but I am not surprised by what transpired after Carol Stuart’s death. On October 23, 1989, police received a phone call from Chuck Stuart, reporting that he and his wife had been carjacked and shot. His pregnant wife had been shot in the head and would later die, but only after her baby had been saved. It took police some time to find them, but eventually, they were located in Mission Hill, a Black neighborhood in Boston.
Before he was taken to the hospital, Chuck identified the shooter as a Black man wearing a tracksuit. Chuck spent several days in the hospital recovering from his injuries. He missed his wife’s funeral. As one might imagine, the city of Boston went apesh** after learning a white woman and her husband had been kidnapped, driven into a Black neighborhood, and shot.
In the days and weeks that followed, police were not trying to locate one Black suspect. To the Irish cops who grew up in Charlestown and Southie, every Black man was a suspect. Cops terrorized the Black community in Mission Hill. The news media, meanwhile, inflamed racial tensions, putting every white woman afraid of leaving their neighborhood in front of a camera to Karen all over the 11 o’clock news.
That’s the setup of Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage, & Reckoning, a three-part documentary series. I assumed after the first episode that it was about how an entire community could be blamed, harassed, and terrorized by the police for the actions of one person (sound familiar?), and it is. But for those unfamiliar with the case, the end of the first episode delivers a twist that I didn’t see coming. I won’t spoil it for anyone who wants to watch, but the Wikipedia entry is easy to find. The twist reframes the entire incident, but it also doesn’t change the underlying dynamic: Boston is racist AF.
It’s a fascinating true-crime case by itself. Still, director Jason Hehir smartly sets it against the backdrop of the racial tensions in Boston and how the killing affected more than just the family of Carol Stuart. It brought out the worst in Boston, and I suspect that 34 years later, many of the scars from that time continue to linger. It also does an excellent job of explaining the origins of Boston’s racism, its trigger points, and its ugly history.
