About the Day-April 5th 1976
A scuffle began. The protesters spotted Landsmark and turned on him. One went to trip him up. A couple of them yelled “Get the nigger.” A few of the anti-busing protesters at the front jumped him. He was being kicked and punched. Another unidentified black man hurried away from the scene.
The flag bearer, Joseph Rakes of South Boston, circled around and began to swing the flag at Landsmark. Age 17, Rakes had loved school but had stopped going entirely a year into the protests against busing. He worked part time to help his parents pay the bills, which now included tuition to send his older siblings to a private academy formed to educate those students who refused to attend South Boston or Charlestown High School. Rakes’ anger at a situation beyond his control was never far from the surface. He attended most rallies against busing and, on this day, he rushed into the fracas. Some officers of the police mobile operations patrol and some adults intervened, but too late. The incident lasted maybe fifteen or twenty seconds. Landsmark’s glasses were shattered and his nose broken. He was left drifting, bloodied and dazed.
As Forman shot the scene, he felt the motor drive freeze; it was skipping. So he overrode it by starting to shoot single frames. He managed about 23 clicks. Just as suddenly as the scuffle had erupted it ended. He didn’t know what he had. In fact, he did not think much of it. Assaults like this happened all the time and seldom made for dramatic pictures. What he knew was that most of the other photographers were caught behind the pack. Because he arrived late, Forman was in front and, of all the photographers on the scene, closest to the action. If he had been there earlier, he would have missed it.
Landsmark stumbled toward his feet, and even tried to continue on to his meeting. A reporter approached him, and then went off to cover the crowd. The police stepped in. Clarence Jones, the deputy mayor, who also witnessed the assault from the office window, raced downstairs. He accompanied Landsmark to the hospital. Doctors treated the victim for contusions and a broken nose, placed a huge bandage over his face, and released him.
Witnesses to the assault included Boston’s Mayor Kevin White, who viewed the scene from his fifth-floor office: “This man, as I could see with my own eyes, had been walking calmly, quietly, and alone across City Hall Plaza right under my window when he was attacked. 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.”
Some of the students who did not participate, indeed who recoiled with shock at the assault, trembled with disbelief. At the time, someone said Landsmark must have provoked the attack by making a gesture, but an incredulous Landsmark told reporters, “I didn’t have time to make an obscene gesture.” Several years later, Lisa McGoff, whose family was profiled by J.Anthony Lukas in his Pulitzer-Prize winning book Common Ground, an examination of the busing crisis told through the lives of three families, informed Lukas that she imagined that Landsmark instigated the incident. According to Lukas, McGoff’s first thought was that “this has to be a trick, because no black guy in his right mind would walk smack into the middle of an anti-busing demonstration.”
But it was no trick. Landsmark told a writer who wondered how this could happen to such a well-educated and well-respected person that “I couldn’t put my Yale degree in front of me to protect myself. The thing that is most troubling is that it happened not because I was somebody but because I was anybody. . . . I was just a nigger they were trying to kill.” To another reporter Landsmark said, “I was just out there walking to City Hall in my three-piece suit. I was anyone.” And suddenly, someone tried “to kill me with the American flag.”
Copyright Louis P. Masur, excerpted from The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph that Shocked America (Bloomsbury Press, 2008)
