If he can talk about it, he should.

Bennett, a Black man who had nothing to do with the crime. After Stuart jumped to his death from the Tobin Bridge in January 1990, it became clear he deliberately tapped into the biases and fears of white people to distract attention from himself as a suspect in the murder of his wife, Carol DiMaiti Stuart.

What does it all mean to Flynn’s legacy as a supposed racial healer? The recent Globe series, podcast, and HBO documentary on the case resurrect a question that was first raised when Stuart’s lie finally unraveled — one which Flynn has never really fully or publicly confronted. According to Globe columnist Adrian Walker, who was part of a team of journalists that worked on the Stuart reckoning, Flynn twice agreed to talk but then changed his mind. Flynn, who is 84 and has had some recent health challenges, did not respond to my email request for comment.

If he can talk about it, he should. When it comes to matters of race in Boston, Flynn changed the conversation in tone and substance. For the most part, he appealed to Boston’s better angels. But under pressure from white Boston during the Stuart case, he tuned out the outcry in the Black community and succumbed to racist stereotypes. With that, he had plenty of company. Yet overall, through policies, appointments, and post-Stuart police reforms, he tried to put Boston on a path to racial justice and harmony. To use a currently loaded word, context matters.

“I am not against Stuart being part of the story,” Neil Sullivan, the longtime Flynn aide who was the administration’s overall efforts on race, Rivers said, “He was objectively trying to heal the city. There’s no question.”

When Flynn first took the oath of office in January 1984, he promised to “break down the walls of misunderstanding and bigotry” and build a city that was open, welcoming, and accessible to all. Given his once fierce opposition to court-ordered busing to desegregate Boston schools, that was remarkable. Forty years later, the narrative of Flynn as racial healer has been buffed by stories about his friendship with the late Mel King, the Black candidate he beat in the epic mayoral battle of 1983, and by the progressive agenda he embraced as mayor. It works — especially if you leave out what happened with the Stuart case.

The positive things Flynn did include policies like linkage, which required downtown developers to build in less sought-after neighborhoods and hire people of color. Flynn also led efforts to desegregate public housing, a courageous move that subjected him to vitriol from his South Boston neighbors. In his landslide 1987 reelection, he lost only two neighborhoods, both in Southie.

In his first term, Flynn also started to change the face of power in Boston, with appointments like that of George Russell, the city’s first Black treasurer. Today Ted Landsmark, a professor of urban policy at Northeastern University, still believes those Flynn hires represent “a significant breakthrough not just for the city but for the state as well. It opened doors to a number of public officials with real authority around policy making.”

Landsmark was one of those breakthroughs.