Minutes before he was beaten to the ground and had his nose broken, Ted Landsmark was just late.
Frantically searching for parking in downtown Boston, he knew he wasn’t going to make it on time for the meeting he was slated to attend at City Hall to discuss hiring minority workers in construction jobs.
Landsmark hurried toward City Hall with the coat of his three-piece suit trailing in the wind, cutting around the main plaza’s corner, when a swath of young, white anti-busing protesters came into view. The exchange that followed happened in only 15 or 20 seconds, but would set the city ablaze, largely because of one photojournalist’s decision to cover the rally.
Stanley Forman was expecting another routine anti-busing demonstration that morning 50 years ago on April 5, 1976. He felt no pressure to arrive on time, even stopping to give an apple to his girlfriend who worked near City Hall on his way to the rally, according to Louis P. Masur’s book about Forman and Landsmark.
At around 10 o’clock that morning, Forman entered City Hall’s main plaza and primed his two Nikon cameras. Two years after Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr.’s ruling that initiated Boston’s desegregation busing plan, he thought this would be just another standard display of resistance to the decision.
When Landsmark turned the corner, Forman had his eye hugged up against the viewfinder of his camera. Some of the protest’s leaders passed Landsmark, but a few people veered back toward him. As their paths crossed, someone struck Landsmark in the face, breaking his nose and knocking his glasses to the ground. Some assailants yelled slurs; one carried an American flag, swinging it at Landsmark and narrowly missing him with the tip of the flagpole.
At the time, Landsmark had already been involved in the civil rights movement for at least a decade. Attending the Marches on Selma and the March on Washington “prepared [him] well for how to react when the flag incident took place,” Landsmark said in an interview with The Banner.
“I had experienced fear in Selma as one of many civil rights marchers,” Landsmark said. “It had never occurred to me that becoming a lawyer in Boston would put me in a place where I would be attacked by a group of anti-busing demonstrators.”
When Landsmark, bloodied and disoriented, rose to his feet again, his attackers had already scattered and run off. A police officer broke through the crowd and told him that the attack had been seen from the mayor’s office. Clarence Jones, deputy mayor of Boston at the time, rushed to Landsmark’s aid and accompanied him to the hospital.
“He was taking no part in any demonstration … yet he became a victim because he was a Black man who came in contact with a bunch of hooligans,” Mayor Kevin White said in a Boston Globe article the next day after witnessing the assault.
Out of around 23 photos Forman took during the encounter, one stood out. It depicted 17-year-old Joseph Rakes, reputed to be his high school’s junior class president by one report, brandishing the American flag. Rakes appeared moments away from impaling Landsmark with the flag while another man held him in place.
Landsmark later stated that the man who seemed to be holding him in place, Jimmy Kelly, a fervent anti-busing protester, was actually trying to pull him away from the conflict.
The photo ran in the publication Forman worked for, the Herald American, a day after the incident and was used by numerous other publications in the days following. Upon submitting the photo to be considered for a Pulitzer Prize, Forman went with a title suggested by Bill Lewis, a Herald American editor. “The Soiling of Old Glory” went on to win the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography.
As Landsmark laid in his hospital bed, a Black doctor offered him a choice: either he could be given a small bandage to cover his broken nose or a larger, more striking one, Masur’s book stated. Landsmark, realizing the position of influence he’d been thrust into, had nearly his entire face covered in medical tape.
At a press conference two days after the incident, Landsmark gave a speech emphasizing that his attack was a symptom of a problem bigger than himself, busing, or desegregation.
“Business, both of color and white, and government must start to work now purposely to create a sound economic environment within the communities in which citizens of color now live and work and that includes City Hall Plaza,” Landsmark said at the conference.
Most civil rights activists that Landsmark knew in Boston did not have a platform to speak out against the racism they faced, he said. Landsmark said he felt a “responsibility” to amplify the voices of those silenced advocates, accepting counseling from them for public appearances after the incident.
In the weeks following the attack, letters poured into news organizations from outraged groups and citizens. Some called for justice for Landsmark or expressed anger at the misuse of the American flag in the country’s bicentenary year; others criticized local news, accusing it of bias toward the anti-busing cause.
Several letters called out Louise Day Hicks, a city councilor and founder of Restore Our Alienated Rights (ROAR), the leading organization in the anti-busing movement. The letters criticized her for inviting protesters into City Hall’s chambers to salute the American flag before Landsmark was attacked; Forman’s account alleged that she even gave the protesters cookies and milk.
Some Black rights advocates at the time considered Hicks to be the lynchpin of the anti-busing movement. A little more than a month after Landsmark’s beating, Mary Ellen Smith, executive director of the City-Wide Educational Coalition, sent a letter to Mayor White, accusing him of being “afraid” of Hicks.
“Louise Day Hicks has created a monster which even she cannot control,” Smith said in the letter, now archived in Northeastern University’s Digital Repository Service. “You have got to stop looking to her to solve the problem which she played a major role in creating.”
Hicks, however, was only the public face for a system of power brokers that stood against integration and hid their racist tendencies through policy and economic regulations, Landsmark said. Many employers, including university administrators, real estate leaders, and MBTA managers upheld racist policies that kept Boston “deeply segregated,” he added.
The publication of “The Soiling of Old Glory” in newspapers represented a turning point for ROAR and other anti-busing advocates, undermining their longstanding argument that the anti-busing movement wasn’t rooted in racism.
The next year, Hicks was not reelected to city council, and several other anti-busing proponents lost their political positions as well.
The incident also precipitated several high-level city and community meetings which led to opening and integration in several portions of Boston’s highly segregated job market, Landsmark said.
While Judge Garrity Jr.’s court-ordered busing plan did not officially end until 1987, the 1977 elections – and the role Landsmark’s story played in them – was a blow that the anti-busing movement never fully recovered from.
Today, 79-year-old Landsmark is a distinguished professor of public policy and urban affairs at Northeastern University. After serving on the Boston Planning and Development Agency Board for 12 years, Landsmark attended his final meeting with the group on March 19, stepping down to open the position for someone new.
Landsmark said that we’ve “taken steps backwards” towards the type of overt racial discrimination he became a victim of half a century ago. Reflecting on his decades of service to Boston and the racial justice movement nationwide, he said there’s still “a tremendous amount of work to be done.”
“We still have a long way to go, and there continues to be historically deep patterns of exclusion of Black and brown people from greater Boston’s economy,” Landsmark said. “The bottom line is — the struggle continues.”
This story was produced in partnership between the Bay State Banner and the Boston University Department of Journalism.