About the Day-April 5th 1976
When the marchers arrived at City Hall, Louise Day Hicks invited them into the empty council chamber. Hicks embodied the South Boston community. Her father, a distinguished lawyer and banker, was also a special justice on the South Boston District Court. After he died, she devoted herself to education, the law, and politics. She earned a bachelor’s degree at age thirty six, and a law degree three years later. Elected to the school committee in 1961, she soon found herself at the center of a debate over de facto segregation in the schools. She lost a close election for Mayor in 1967. She served on the City Council and one term as a Congresswoman. Hicks was now the leader of the Council. When Judge Garrity issued his order, she helped found ROAR—Restore Our Alienated Rights, an organization militantly opposed to busing. For months, she kept a ROAR poster in her window office, high above City Hall Plaza.
Hicks had not known that the students were coming until she heard it announced on the radio. She looked out of her office window onto the plaza and saw them walking, carrying signs. A few went to her office. The students presented a list of their demands: they wanted an end to busing, they wanted accurate reporting of racial incidents, and they wanted the Superintendent to resign. Hicks, who often wore hats and gloves and bright colored dresses and projected a ladylike manner that seemed at odds with the anger that engulfed her, served hot chocolate to the marchers, and together in the council chamber everyone said the pledge of allegiance. The students stood proud. One held an American flag in his left hand and placed his right hand over his heart. Hicks herself often wore a rhinestone-spangled flag pin, and had once declared that “the flag is motherhood and apple pie.”
As the students filed out of the chambers and headed outside, they passed a group of black students from a nearby magnet school going on a tour. Some epithets were exchanged, and pieces of food—donuts, cookies, apples—flew back and forth. Groups have moods, and the protesters, fueled with cocoa and patriotism, marched onto the plaza feeling righteous about their cause. At that moment, a black man turned the corner and headed in their direction.
Ted Landsmark was late to a meeting. A lawyer for the Contractors’ Association, he was headed to City Hall for discussions on minority hiring in construction jobs. Dressed well on this mild April morning, he was wearing a favorite three-piece suit, and enjoying the brisk walk.
Landsmark enjoyed his position with the Contractors Association. His legal training came into play, as did his interest in civil rights and his continuing passion for architecture and environmental design. It was his work for the Association that had him rushing to a meeting at City Hall on the morning of April 5, 1976.
NEXT: The marchers spotted Landsmark coming toward them. So did a photographer ... >>
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Copyright Louis P. Masur, excerpted from The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph that Shocked America (Bloomsbury Press, 2008)
