In April 1976, a 29-year-old Black lawyer named Ted Landsmark was rushing through Boston’s City Hall on the way to a meeting. Landsmark was pushed to the ground, stomped on, had his nose broken, and a white man brandishing a flagpole with an American flag on it lunged at him.
It was during a protest over court-ordered busing to integrate Boston’s schools. Landsmark had marched in Civil Rights protests in Alabama, but said he never imagined he’d be attacked in Boston. The incident was captured in a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph by Stanley Forman, called “The Soiling of Old Glory.”
“ That moment was indelibly embedded in my consciousness and really structured the identity that I’ve had in Boston for the last half century,” Landsmark said.
