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What had happened was partly an accident of timing—a collision between a man walking to a meeting and young protesters out to make a point, a skirmish in Boston’s epic confrontation over court-ordered busing to desegregate the city’s public schools. But in Stanley J. Forman’s photograph, the symbolism of the moment—the anger, the flag, the staggered figure that happened to be Ted Landsmark—seemed to epitomize the frustrations and grievances of a city on the edge.
Boston’s battle over busing dominated local civic life for more than a decade following a federal judge’s 1974 order to desegregate the schools. (The judge, W. Arthur Garrity, withdrew from the case 16 years later.) Forman, then a photographer for the Boston Herald American, had covered the issue from the start. “I was there for every bad thing that happened,” he says, “and this was the climax of it—of everything bad that can happen when you live in a town that is so heated up.”
On that day, April 5, 1976, Forman went to City Hall Plaza to photograph a demonstration by students opposed to busing. After taking a few pictures of the protesters, he glanced over his shoulder. “I saw this black man coming around the corner and a bell went off in my head,” he says. “And I said, ‘They’re going to get him!’ I didn’t think they would get him with the flag.”
Landsmark, a Yale-educated lawyer then 29, was late for a meeting on affirmative action in city construction projects. As he walked toward city hall, he was mulling over what he planned to say, when a crowd rounded a corner and suddenly approached him.
“There wasn’t anything for me to do at that point other than to walk straight,” recalls Landsmark, now president of the Boston Architectural Center, an architectural college.
Several people assaulted him; his glasses were knocked off; he was hit and kicked. Joseph Rakes, then 17, swung a flagpole bearing the Stars and Stripes at him—Landsmark says Rakes tried to hit him but not spear him, as Forman’s picture suggests—and narrowly missed. One blow broke Landsmark’s nose.
A labor foreman now living in Maine, Rakes vividly recalls the “blind anger” that motivated him—anger aimed, he says, at the urban policies that were ruining the close-knit South Boston neighborhood where he’d grown up. “When the busing started, it was, ‘You can’t have half your friends’—that’s the way it was put towards us,” Rakes says. “They took half the guys and girls I grew up with and said, ‘You’re going to school on the other side of town.’ Nobody understood it at [age] 15.”
