The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph That Shocked America

By Louis P. Masur and Ted Landsmark

Now available as a paperback: the history of a disturbing image, now iconic, that expressed the turmoil of the 1970s and race relations in the United States, with a new preface by the author and a foreword by Ted Landsmark.
 
In 1976, Boston was bitterly divided over a court order to desegregate its public schools. Plans to bus students between predominantly white and Black neighborhoods stoked backlash and heated protests. Photojournalist Stanley Forman was covering one such demonstration at City Hall when he captured an indelible image: a white protester attacking a Black attorney with the American flag. A second white man grabs at the victim, appearing to assist the assailant.
 
The photo appeared in newspapers across the nation and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. In The Soiling of Old Glory, esteemed historian Louis P. Masur reveals what happened the day of the assault and the ways these events reverberated long afterward. He interviews the men involved: Forman, who took the photo; Ted Landsmark, a Black, Yale-educated attorney and an activist; Joseph Rakes, the white protester lunging with the flag, a disaffected student; and Jim Kelly, a local politician who opposed busing, but who helped Landsmark to his feet after protesters knocked him to the ground. The photo, Masur discovers, holds more complexities than initially meet the eye. The flag never made contact with the victim, for example, and Kelly was attempting to protect Landsmark, not hurt him.
 
Masur delves into the history behind Boston’s efforts to desegregate the schools and the anti-busing protests that shook the city. He examines photography’s power to move, inform, and persuade us, as well as the assumptions we each bring to an image as viewers. And he delves into the flag, to explore how other artists and photographers have shaped, bolstered, or challenged its patriotic significance.
 
Gripping and deeply researched, The Soiling of Old Glory shows how a disturbing event, frozen on a film, impacted Boston and the nation. In an age of renewed calls for visual literacy and disagreements about the flag’s meaning, Masur’s history, now updated with a new foreword by Ted Landsmark and a new preface by the author, is as relevant as ever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Release date: Mar 29, 2024
• ISBN: 9781684582181

Louis P. Masur

Louis P. Masur is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor in American Institutions and Values at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. He is the author of many books including 1831: Year of Eclipse; Autumn Glory: Baseball's First World Series; The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph that Shocked America; and Runaway Dream: Born to Run and Bruce Springsteen's American Vision. His most recent book, The Civil War: A Concise History, will be published in 2012.

Book preview

THE SOILING OF OLD GLORY

THE STORY OF A PHOTOGRAPH THAT SHOCKED AMERICA

LOUIS P. MASUR

BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY PRESS

WALTHAM, MASSACHUSETTS

Brandeis University Press

© 2008 Louis P. Masur

Preface © 2024 Louis P. Masur

Foreword © 2024 Ted Landsmark

All rights reserved

First Brandeis University Press edition 2024

Previously published by Bloomsbury Press, New York in 2008

For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Brandeis University Press, 415 South Street, Waltham, MA 02453, or visit brandeisuniversitypress.com

Acknowledgments

America, from Collected Poems 1947–1980 by Allen Ginsberg. Copyright © 1956, 1959 by Allen Ginsberg. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Thunder Road by Bruce Springsteen. Copyright © 1975 Bruce Springsteen, renewed © 2003 Bruce Springsteen (ASCAP). Reprinted by permission. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Masur, Louis P, author.

Title: The soiling of Old Glory : the story of a photograph that shocked America / Louis P Masur.

Description: First Brandeis University Press edition. | Waltham, Massachusetts : Brandeis University Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: Gripping and deeply researched, The Soiling of Old Glory shows how a disturbing event, frozen on a film, impacted Boston and the nation. In an age of renewed calls for visual literacy and disagreements about the flag’s meaning, Masur’s history, now updated with a new foreword by Ted Landsmark and a new preface by the author, is as relevant as ever—Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023051150 (print) | LCCN 2023051151 (ebook) | ISBN 9781684582174 (paperback) | ISBN 9781684582181 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Boston (Mass.)—Race relations—History—20th century. | Flags—Desecration—United States—Pictorial works. | Photojournalism—Social aspects—United States—Case studies. | Photojournalism—Political aspects—United States—Case studies. | Protest movements—Massachusetts—Boston—History—20th century. | Busing for school integration—Massachusetts—Boston—History—20th century. | African Americans—Massachusetts—Boston—Interviews. | White people—Massachusetts—Boston—Interviews. | Interviews—Massachusetts—Boston. | United States—Race relations—History—20th century. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / General | PHOTOGRAPHY / Photojournalism

Classification: LCC F73.9.A1 M38 2024 (print) | LCC F73.9.A1 (ebook) | DDC 974.4/6100496073—dc23/eng/20231102

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023051150

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023051151

Cover photograph by Stanley Forman

Manufactured in the United States of America

For Tom, Doug, and Jim

and to the memory of my parents

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1 THE INCIDENT

CHAPTER 2 BOSTON AND BUSING

CHAPTER 3 THE PHOTOGRAPH

CHAPTER 4 OLD GLORY

CHAPTER 5 THE IMPACT

CHAPTER 6 REVERBERATIONS

AFTERWORD

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY

INDEX

FOREWORD

HOW DOES a photographic image contribute toward advancing the cause of social justice? How does one assess the policy-making impact of an image by Lewis Hine, Margaret Bourke-White, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Eddie Adams, Diane Arbus, Roy DeCarava, or Sebastião Salgado? Can a photographic work of art affect prescriptive policies?

Stanley Forman’s dramatic photograph The Soiling of Old Glory is a definitive statement of racism in America. Viewers are shocked to see our national symbol of liberty and justice for all being used as a weapon of racial hatred. What I said publicly right after nearly being killed by an American flag-wielding demonstrator was, in retrospect, an easy statement for me to make. I had been to the 1963 March on Washington, and in college I had joined northern students in Selma, Alabama, marching for racial justice—there, I had been hunted by racist night riders. I had been spat on in civil rights demonstrations in New Haven, and insulted by daily personal micro-aggressions. I had felt racism in New York’s streets, shops, restaurants, churches, and cultural institutions. Importantly, I had been present to hear the angry, calming, reflective, and inspired statements of civil rights leaders, who were always seeking a path forward when under stress.

By the time I moved to Boston as a young lawyer and community activist in 1973, I was prepared to try to transcend my anger at endemic racism by offering forward-looking comments and specific recommendations that public agencies and private businesses and individuals could take to overcome long-standing racial biases. I was ready to respond to my City Hall attackers with words that put their violence towards me in a broader context. I had already been an advocate and facilitator for civil rights dialogues, truth-telling, education, historical accuracy, and opening opportunities to those traditionally excluded from the economic mainstream because of their race. Intuitive press photographer Stanley Forman, a previous Pulitzer Prize winner, was present on City Hall Plaza to capture what became a lifetime signature image that shocked the city and became a catalyst for social change. I have often thanked him for taking an extraordinary photograph that has become a definitive statement about white racism directed towards people of color.

I knew in the moments after being attacked that expressing anger toward one’s assailants might feel authentic but would not engage a wider public in actions that could lead to progress away from racism and toward community understanding and healing. I knew that platforms to speak thoughtfully about the effects of racism and the steps to be taken to advance beyond it, do not always come predictably, and that when such opportunities arise, one must be ready to speak truth to power.

I was able to speak to reporters within an hour of the incident about the need to hold accountable those political and social leaders who had encouraged and condoned violence against children or had remained silent while their neighbors committed racist acts on Boston’s streets, in government, and in corporate suites. My remarks sought to shift the responsibility and accountability for the violence directed at me away from my attackers to those silent actors behind the scenes in a long-racist Boston, the actors who benefitted, and continue to benefit from pitting one working class group against another, along racial lines. I knew my words would have to respect and have meaning for Black and white residents seeking a resolution to Boston’s racial issues.

From that transformative moment on, changes in civic and policy attitudes began to result in progress for Black and brown people in Boston as the photograph was disseminated around the world. I became engaged with the racial dialogues that began among Boston’s civic leadership, community organizations, and nonprofit entities because of the shame, embarrassment and projected economic losses resulting from increased negative publicity in that Bicentennial Year. We discussed the city’s class and ethnic divisions, racial violence, court mandates for integration, and Boston’s reputation as an unwelcoming city for people of color. Community-based advocacy for change began to generate focused initiatives in housing integration, youth employment, more widely shared educational access, racially-based disinvestment and limited career opportunities, economic development in communities of color, greater cultural awareness, and public job opportunities. The attack on me helped incentivize dialogue, among silent residents and corporate and civic leaders, about long-standing patterns of discrimination and racial exclusion, just as the murders of young Blacks inspired dialogue and action through the Black Lives Matter movement decades later.

Boston has changed as the population is now constituted primarily of people of color, with many immigrants and over eighty languages represented in the schools. Our first elected woman mayor is Asian American, and many of our local elected officials are women of color. The economy has grown substantially thanks in part to innovative talent, great universities, and shared investments in the region’s future. The work of combatting and transcending racial, gender, and class injustices embedded in American society continues, led by a new generation of diverse, intentionally anti-racist policymakers. Raw Black vs. white animosities have evolved into more nuanced collaborative efforts to create diverse cross-cultural understandings.

Much work towards racial and social justice remains to be done to overcome the economic, health, criminal justice, educational, and social disparities and injustices that continue today, particularly in America’s private sector, including technology, finance and investment, universities, and real estate. Systemic racism has been embedded in American society from before the Constitution up to today, but documentary images of racism in action are rarely captured as dramatically as here—most systemic racism is now expressed far more subtly in workplaces, employment practices, families, and social settings.

We never know when we might be called on to make a transformative statement about racial or social justice. The statement might be verbal, visual, or gestural. When that moment comes, we need to be ready with words from the heart or actions that heal, or inspire, or inform, where a sense of personal risk might otherwise engender silence. We may be at work, in a classroom, at a sporting event, or at a social gathering, where our negative response to someone’s casually racist remark or action will lead to embarrassment, or an angry backlash, or isolation. It takes courage and a sense of ethical commitment to be publicly critical of racism in settings that are often personal, professional, or familial. One must speak instinctively and forcefully, or the transformative moment might be lost. That is not always easy with colleagues, family, or friends.

The historic moment captured on film by Stanley Forman is a catalyst for dialogue about how to overcome the fears and isolation that underlie racism, while planning for a more open, tolerant, and inclusive American future. We need these deeper and sometimes painful conversations about race to heal and support one another more equitably and justly in a democratic society.

Dist. Prof. Ted Landsmark, M.Env.D., J.D., Ph.D.

School of Public Policy, Northeastern University

PREFACE

IN 2022, forty-six years after Stanley Forman took the iconic, Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph of a student attacking a Black man with an American flag outside City Hall in Boston, the photographer found himself in the living room of the assailant. A film crew was doing a documentary on The Soiling of Old Glory, and the director had reunited Forman with Joseph Rakes, the student with the flag.

Rakes welcomed Forman, and said it was technically the second time they had met; he considered the moment of the photograph the first. He told Forman that once, in the immediate aftermath of the photograph, when some South Boston residents blamed Forman for the condemnation they received, he stopped them from throwing rocks at him.

Now, nearly fifty years after the photograph, Forman and Rakes still live in Boston. So too does Ted Landsmark, the victim of the attack. The city has made some strides in coming to terms with its reputation as a racist place hostile to Blacks. Since 2013, a statue of Bill Russell, the Boston Celtics great, stands near the spot where Landsmark was attacked. In 2021, Kim Janey, a Black woman, who, as a child in 1976 experienced the protests against busing, became acting mayor of Boston. Following her, Boston elected an Asian American woman as mayor. On the current City Council, for the first time in history, a majority of seats are held by women and people of color.

This is not to say the city is not troubled still by racial issues. In 2016, two Black students, at historic Boston Latin, campaigned against racial insensitivity and discrimination at the school. That same year, the state’s Supreme Judicial Court ruled, in Commonwealth v. Warren, that Black men might have legitimate reason to flee from the police.

Whatever the situation locally in Boston, nationally the problem of racial violence and police brutality exploded across America as incident after incident starting in 2014 saw the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, following the killings of Eric Garner in New York, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, George Floyd in Minneapolis, and many others. In Boston, the Black Lives Matter movement has worked for reform within the Boston Police Department. Forman’s photograph remains a powerful reminder and symbol of the forces of racial hatred that continue to plague the nation.

In 2016, on the fortieth anniversary of the photograph, Landsmark commented on the flag as a symbol of what we desire to be as a democracy, though obviously a complicated one. I view myself as an American who has benefited tremendously from the best America can provide. And I also recognize that in the name of the flag some very heinous things have been done to people in this country and elsewhere, he told National Public Radio.

Landsmark’s comment came before flag-waving insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Some observers compared several images taken that day to The Soiling of Old Glory, a visual reference point to the repellant uses of the flag. In 2023, a rioter who used the pole of the flag to attack a police officer at the Capitol was sentenced to four years in prison for assault with a dangerous weapon.

Images of the flag are a touchstone, and in the decades since it appeared, The Soiling of Old Glory remains an indispensable part of any American narrative, just like Joe Rosenthal’s Raising of the Flag on Mt. Suribachi (1945) before it and Tom Franklin’s Flag Raising at Ground Zero (2001) after. The fiftieth anniversary of the photograph in 2026 is also the 250th anniversary of the birth of the nation. It is an anniversary that will occasion reflections on the meaning of the American experiment. No account of the struggles for democracy and racial justice is complete without a discussion of The Soiling of Old Glory, a photograph that continues to startle viewers and provoke questions about where we have been and where we are headed.

INTRODUCTION

THE TEENAGER SAT on the subway, daydreaming in the late afternoon as he rode to his part-time job cleaning offices in downtown Boston. He looked up and saw a man across the aisle holding open the Herald American, one of the city’s two newspapers. Front-page center was a staggering photograph of an angry white protester thrusting an American flag at a black man whose arms are being held. He wondered: who is that lunatic with the flag? In the same instant he realized that it was him. He skipped work and went home to South Boston. I think I have a problem, he told his parents.

Nearly thirty years later, in 2005, residents across Boston held a series of City-Wide Dialogues on Boston’s Ethnic and Racial Diversity. To one meeting, someone brought Stanley Forman’s Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph that had appeared on April 6, 1976, in the Herald American, and in newspapers across the country. The participants at the meeting had been quiet, but the image of a black man being assaulted with the American flag broke the silence. Michael James, a thirty-nine-year-old African American resident of Roxbury, said, Everybody in the room no matter their race was appalled. It accelerated the conversation. It was like: ‘We do have something in common. We don’t want this to ever happen again.’

Image: Stanley Forman, The Soiling of Old Glory, 1976 (COURTESY STANLEY FORMAN, [e-mail])

Stanley Forman, The Soiling of Old Glory, 1976 (COURTESY STANLEY FORMAN, [e-mail])

The photograph presents a sickening sight. A well-dressed black man is being grabbed from behind. He seems to be struggling to free himself. His satchel lies behind him at his feet. A large crowd, composed mostly of high school students, looks on. The flag bearer’s feet are planted, his hands firmly grasping the staff, his eyes focused on his target. His hair flows back as he prepares to lunge forward. Attacker and victim are forever frozen in time, and we feel trapped beside them. We can glance away, but we cannot escape the horror of what we imagine the next instant will bring.

Forman’s photograph, taken on April 5, 1976, is implanted in the collective memory and identity of Boston and the nation. One commentator called it the shot heard round the world for its indelible portrait of American racism. In the more than thirty years since the picture was taken, the image has often been invoked, especially when an event has some racial dimension. In the Massachusetts election for governor in 2006, the possibility that Deval Patrick would become the first African American elected statewide since Senator Edward Brooke more than three decades earlier brought repeated references to the image. After Patrick was chosen the first black governor in the state’s history, an op-ed in the Boston Globe began with reference to the photograph—one of the most notorious icons in Massachusetts history . . . It was an ugly moment and an unforgettable picture—and all the proof countless viewers needed that Boston was a caldron of bigotry. The writer hoped that Patrick’s inauguration will finally wash away the shameful stain of that day in 1976.

Boston is not the only city that has been defined by a harrowing image of racial hatred, but Forman’s photograph is distinctive. Many of the most notorious images of racial violence involve police brutality—the authorities using excessive force against African Americans. Think of police dogs set loose upon civil rights marchers in Birmingham or the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles. In contrast, Forman’s shot captures one citizen attacking another. And it was not just any violent assault, but one that employed the American flag as a weapon—in the year of the nation’s Bicentennial, no less. It was an unprecedented act of desecration, one that transgressed every principle most Americans held dear.

The image, taken eighteen months into the battle over the desegregation of the public schools, crystallized Boston’s reputation as a racist city. For more than a generation, the city has struggled to overcome the damage done by the busing crisis, for which Forman’s photograph, rightly or wrongly, is taken as the defining moment. The picture punctured the nation’s comfortable illusion that the struggle over civil rights was primarily a southern phenomenon. Even the pictures from Little Rock in 1957, of screaming white women stalking a young black student on her way to school, pale in comparison to the hatred captured here. An assault against a black man with the American flag in Boston, the so-called Cradle of Liberty, made the image all the more revolting.

Not only in Boston but also across the nation the photograph served as a harsh reminder that the triumphs of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s had turned tragic. Progress had been made, but alongside it stood backlash and failure. Americans cherished stories of wrongs righted, of darkness yielding to light, but Forman’s picture provided a poisonous counter-narrative. The brotherhood of man was a worthy ideal, and it even seemed at times that a strong foundation had been laid for its realization. But in a claustrophobic courtyard, a white man turned the American flag against a black man, and the ideal crumbled.

I cannot recall when I first saw the photograph. It is possible I saw it in the New York Times when I was a college student. I certainly saw it reproduced in various histories of civil rights I read in graduate school. I remember staring at the image for long stretches of time, and wondering about the story. Who did this? What happened? Why is the photograph so compelling? Few works talked in any detail about the picture, and the captions said little. Books used it as an illustration, its meaning supposedly self-evident. But the picture not only recorded something awful, it also shaped what followed. It is an image that is felt as much as seen, a searing image that discomfits yet demands our attention. The photograph stayed with me over the years, as it has with many who saw it in 1976 or since.

A few years ago, I contacted Stanley Forman. I met with him, and he told me the story of the shot, shared with me the other pictures he took that day, and talked about his career. As I researched the image, I learned the identities of some of the individuals in the photograph. I