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THE WEEKLY REVEAL

Saturday, December 7, 2024

Hello! In this issue:

  • When Carol Stuart was murdered in 1989, Boston was all too willing to believe her husband’s story: A Black man did it.
  • In partnership with ICT, we expose the painful legacy of boarding schools for Native children.
  • Looking for a gift for a Reveal listener in your life? Check out our shop.

THIS WEEK’S PODCAST

The Racist Hoax That Changed Boston

An image of a Boston Globe article featuring Carol and Chuck Stuart is projected onto the Boston skyline at night.
Credit: Erin Clark/The Boston Globe

In 1989, Chuck Stuart called 911 on his car phone to report a shooting.

He said he and his wife were leaving a birthing class at a Boston hospital when a man forced him to drive into the mixed-race Mission Hill neighborhood and shot them both. Stuart’s wife, Carol, was seven months pregnant. She would die that night, hours after her son was delivered by cesarean section, and days later, her son would die, too.

Stuart said he saw the man who did it: a Black man in a tracksuit.

Within hours, the killing had the city in a panic, and Boston police were tearing through Mission Hill looking for a suspect.

For a whole generation of Black men in Mission Hill who were subjected to frisks and strip searches, this investigation shaped their relationship with police. And it changed the way Boston viewed itself when the story took a dramatic turn and the true killer was revealed.

In an update of an episode that first aired earlier this year, we partner with the Murder in Boston podcast and associate editor and columnist Adrian Walker of the Boston Globe to bring you the untold story of the Stuart murder: one that exposed truths about race and crime that few White people in power wanted to confront.

Listen to the episode
🎧 Other places to listen: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or wherever you get your podcasts.

 

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One Number to Know

$18 million

When ICT reporter Mary Annette Pember examined the archives of the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions, which ran Indian boarding schools, she found records that showed how much money was taken from Native tribes and reallocated to missions like Holy Rosary on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

When you adjust for inflation, almost $18 million was paid to Holy Rosary from 1903 to 1940 out of funds given to the Lakota tribe through treaties with the US government. So the tribe was actually paying for its children’s forced education, out of its own pocket.

The truth about US Indian boarding school policy and its connection to the Catholic church is starting to emerge. President Joe Biden recently apologized to Native people for the government’s role in the schools, in a historic step toward reconciliation.

In a two-part collaboration with ICT (formerly Indian Country Today), which originally aired in 2022, members of the Pine Ridge community put pressure on the Catholic church to share information about the boarding school it runs on the reservation.

Listen: Buried Secrets: America’s Indian Boarding Schools Part 2

Listen: Go back and hear Part 1
 

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In Case You Missed It

🎧  Swing States of Denial
🎧 The Many Contradictions of a Trump Victory
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This issue of The Weekly Reveal was written by Kate Howard and edited by Nikki Frick. If you enjoyed this issue, forward it to a friend. Have some thoughts? Drop us a line with feedback or ideas!
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