Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.
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NORTHSHOREMAG.COM 66 DECEMBER 2020 A few years after Reverend Andre Bennett immigrated to the United States from Jamaica, he was pulled over by police on Route 128. He was in the left lane, on his way to bring his wife some lunch at her job in Reading, and it took him a moment to safely come to a stop on the side of the road. As soon as he did, Bennett recalls, the police officer stormed at the car, yelling and using obscenities, demanding to know why it had taken so long to pull over. He called Bennett "boy" and asked Bennett's daughter if she was sure he was her father. Finally, the officer wrote Bennett a $365 ticket. The offense? Doing 60 in a 55 zone. Bennett appealed the ticket and it was overturned, but his memories of the angry officer lingered. "It was the interaction that stayed with me," says Bennett, today the youth pastor at Zion Baptist Church in Lynn. "At that point, something kind of clicked." Above, Bennett speaks at a Black Lives Matter protest this summer. Right, Bennett leads the charge during a Black Lives Matter march. I N - D E P T H Bennett could only conclude that it was the color of his skin that sparked the officer's outsized temper and the inflated fine for a minor infraction, a dynamic he'd never experienced in predominantly Black Jamaica. In the years since the eye-opening encounter, Bennett has turned that realization into a mission as the de facto leader of the Black Lives Matter Movement on the North Shore. Getting to the place he is today was a