Via WGBH
By
Diane AdameApril 3, 2026
This April 5, 1976 photo of a white teenager, Joseph Rakes, assaulting a Black man, lawyer and civil rights activist Ted Landsmark, with a flagpole won the Pulitzer Prize for spot photography. The photo was taken during a protest against court-ordered desegregation busing.
Stanley Forman (used with permission)
It has been 50 years since the Pulitzer-Prize winning photo “The Soiling of Old Glory” was taken as a busing desegregation protest erupted throughout City Hall Plaza in Boston.
The photo, which was taken on April 5, 1976, shows a young white man gripping an American flag and aiming it at a young Black man during the protest. The image drew national attention for how it vividly captured racial unrest during the busing crisis in the 1970s.
“The photograph has had significant impact over the decades because it was taken during a bicentennial year where the country was celebrating a number of democratic principles which in fact were being contradicted by what the photo depicts,” said Theodore “Ted” Landsmark, the Black man captured in the photograph.
Stanley Forman, the newspaper photographer who took the photo for the Boston Herald American, still remembers that day.
“It was a Monday… I asked the editor, Alvin Saley, what was going on. He told me there was a demonstration — we went to demonstrations every day — it was an anti-busing demonstration at City Hall,” he said. “I asked if I could go to it, and he said, ‘Sure.’”
The protest was one of many happening in Boston at the time ever since the city began busing students outside of their neighborhoods in 1974 in an effort, mandated by the courts, to desegregate schools.
Forman said he was switching his camera lens when he saw a group of white student protesters walking through the plaza.
“I saw a couple of Black men taking the turn, coming up from Court Street to come onto the plaza, and they were attacked,” he said.
“Ted got the worst of it,” he said. “ They threw things at them, they kicked them, knocked them down and in the end, Joseph Rakes, who was holding the flagpole, whacked him in the nose.”
Landsmark said he was on my way to a meeting in Boston City Hall to discuss affirmative action efforts to bring more employment to people of color in the city.
“I thought that if I simply continued to walk straight, I’d be able to get into City Hall without really encountering the front edge of the demonstrators,” he told GBH in an interview remembering the incident. “But a number of the students walked by me and then several circled back, yelling racial epithets at me.”
Michael Curry, a member of the NAACP national board of directors and head of the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers, said the photo continues to have an impact because it didn’t happen that long ago.
“It made it even more clear for a generation of us that Boston was a tale of two cities, one where people came for opportunity if you were Irish, Italian, Polish, and Jewish,” Curry said, “And another city that had also resisted black political, economic and educational progress in the city.”
Landsmark said he never anticipated that the photo would still be a topic of discussion all these years later.
“Many of the issues that were raised by that photo remain a salient issue, and — unfortunately — unresolved today,” he said. “My hope would be that looking back at it a half century later, we would reflect on the amount of work that remains to be done in order to achieve racial equality in the United States in this year.”
Forman said the photo often gets compared to more recent pictures racial tensions in the U.S.
“The picture gets resurrected every few years because of something happening in this country,” said Forman. “Thankfully, it hasn’t been outdone yet, but nothing lasts forever. Although this picture I think will last the test of time.”
"The Soiling of Old Glory" will be featured in "America The Beautiful", an exhibition of compelling and provocative photographs illustrating America, American life, and the American people as the United States prepares to celebrate its 250th birthday amid the erosion of civil rights, human rights, and democratic norms May 23 - April 9, 2026 at Monroe Gallery of Photography.
