Boston, April 5, 1976
Stanley Forman took this photograph on April 5, 1976, in City Hall Plaza in Boston, earning him his second consecutive Pulitzer Prize. The image is over ripe with echoes of Civil Rights Era viciousness. In terms of public discourse, perhaps one of the most violent things it does is to contradict, even negate, the iconic World War II image of raising the American flag raising over Iwo Jima: transforming a symbol of victorious liberation into one of mob violence.
The bare bones context of this image is thus. In 1974, a Federal Judge, Arthur Garrity ruled that the Boston City School system was highly segregated and ordered the schools to devise as system to reintegrate. When his orders met fierce resistance, especially from white working class neighborhoods like South Boston and Charlestown, Judge Garrity ordered children to be reassigned from their neighborhood schools and bused to schools in other parts of the city. In Boston this in effect meant white kids bused to black neighborhoods and black kids to white neighborhoods. Many days the school buses required police escort to keep them from harm.
Black and White animus goes back a long way in Boston, it is especially volatile among working class Irish. With the first major waves of Irish immigration in the 1840’s came violent anti-immigrant reactions from the dominant WASP society in Boston. The Irish were considered less than white; they were unclean, uncivilized, “negroes turned inside out”. The term mulatto was first employed to derisively describe the offspring of Irish and Black couplings. Before the Civil War, Free Blacks and Irish immigrants were competitors for the most menial of jobs. By the early 20th century, most of Boston’s neighborhoods were divided by ethnicity and race; Blacks in Roxbury, Italians in East Boston and North End, Irish in Southie and Charlestown, as the century progressed Portuguese, Chinese, Puerto Rican immigrants established their own enclaves within those divisions. But for all of that diversity, the most profound tensions remained between inner city Irish and Blacks.
The Civil Rights act of 1965 sought to end to the racist Jim Crow ‘separate but equal’ policies. Largely identified with the South, a Jim Crow culture was very much alive in Northern cities like Boston, especially Boston. Liberal judges like Garrity sought to address the structural inequalities in public education with the long-term hope for changing cultural attitudes overall. But to put it bluntly, the enraged kids in Southie were not going to take it. They inhabited and protected their neighborhoods almost tribally. But self-selecting segregation was not a term applied to the wealthy, white suburbs surrounding Boston, where elites like Judge Garrity lived. This glaring hypocrisy, which exempted people with money from government social engineering, was not lost on the working and poor people of the city.
On April 5, 1976 a group of about 200 white students took to the streets and headed to City Hall where they met Louise Day Hicks, the City Councilor from Southie and founder the anti-busing group R.O.A.R. (Restore Our Alienated Rights). She was not only sympathetic to their cause but also one of the leaders of what they understood to be an epic battle between a neighborhood’s right to self-determination and the tyranny of the Federal Government. Fired up with Hick’s ‘us versus them’ rhetoric, the crowd streamed out into City Hall Plaza and saw a black man in a three-piece suit headed their way. That man was Ted Landsmark, a Yale educated lawyer and a Civil Rights activist who had marched with Martin Luther King from Selma to Montgomery in 1965.
The confrontation lasted less than a minute. Landsmark’s nose was broken and he suffered bruises, lacerations and a despicable attack on his dignity. The image is both revealing and misleading. There is no refuting the rage and intention of the young man wielding the flag. He means harm. The man who appears to be holding Ted Landsmark up for the attacker was actually attempting to help him, having just lifted him off the ground to get him away from the mob. It was 1976, America’s bicentennial year. Boston considers itself the cradle of American Democracy, these were just some of the horribly ironic subtexts to this image that became an immediate and irrefutable icon of continuing bitter racial hatred in America.
At the time of this incident I lived and worked in Boston, not far from City Hall Plaza. I was a student at the University of Massachusetts / Boston studying to become a high school history teacher. Like many first generation college students I thought being a teacher would be a good steady job and a way to give back to the community. Boston Irish were my people; I did not grow up in Southie or Charlestown but my mom came from East Boston, her dad had been a boot-legging fireman in Boston. The ugly stereotypical symbols of Irishness: Shamrocks, whiskey, singing, fighting and racism were not foreign to me. But coming of age in the Vietnam War era, I had become politicized and harbored an amorphous desire to bring what I called the ‘real deal’ of American history to working class kids. I imagined myself a kind of liberating orator forging alliances between black and white kids against the real enemies of class privilege, state power, capitalism and militarism.
But as I prepared myself to teach, visiting schools, watching buses being stoned as they passed into hostile neighborhoods; I began to lose my nerve. What often lurks beneath exclamations of ethnic pride is a deep and stubborn xenophobia. Class rage manifests not on strategic attacks on dominant power but in open antagonism toward perceived enemies close at hand. At this time, I worked in the mail room of Liberty Mutual Insurance Company; my co-workers were young and middle-aged men, mostly from Southie. They found me, and my politics, entertaining; I was so easily aroused to anger. They dredged up every racist and sexist joke they could remember just to chuckle at my reaction. The morning after the photograph of the attack on Ted Landsman appeared on the front page of the newspaper, the photocopier was employed to enlarge and multiply the image to cover the mailroom like wallpaper. Feigning illness, I punched out for the day. These Southie boys, with their easy tribal mockery, made it quite plain that I did not have the courage of my political beliefs.
But the man who suffered the real and terrifying indignities, Ted Landsmark, did not let this insult cloud his political vision. He was aware of the symbolic power of what happened to him and he rightfully expressed his anger in public forums. He later explained that he understood the attack as a symptom of disempowerment among poor and working class whites. It speaks to his extraordinary commitment to equality and civil rights that Landsmark continued his vocation to connect the dots between race, class and alienation in America.
Photograph by Stanley Forman, text by Mark Alice Durant – Thanks to Louis P. Masur and his important book ‘The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph that Shocked America’.
