On a spring day in 1976, photographer Stanley Forman of the Boston Herald American headed to Boston’s City Hall Plaza to cover an anti-busing demonstration. The protests against busing, which was meant to help desegregate the city’s public schools, had been going on for years. But this protest would result in a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo, a disturbing image of a white student attacking a Black man with an American flag: “The Soiling of Old Glory.”
“The Soiling of Old Glory” image primarily concerns three people: Forman, the photographer, Ted Landsmark, a then-29-year-old Black lawyer, and Joseph Rakes, a then-17-year-old white student who attacked Landsmark. But the image is bigger than any one person. Though related to anti-busing, it’s resonated deeply because of its evocative imagery. In one image, Forman captured the deep — and often deeply violent — racial divisions in American society.
This is the full story of “The Soiling of Old Glory,” from the circumstances that led up to it, to the moment of Rakes’ attack on Landsmark, to what happened after it was printed in the Boston Herald American.
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