It was an image that shocked the nation. In “The Soiling of Old Glory” a young Black man is set upon by angry young white men — one wielding a flagpole with the American flag — as he crosses City Hall Plaza following a demonstration against court-ordered busing to achieve racial balance in Boston’s schools. The Pulitzer Prize-winning 1976 photo brought shame upon the city as Americans geared up to celebrate the nation’s Bicentennial.
The victim was Theodore Landsmark, then a 29-year-old lawyer and social justice activist. He wasn’t struck by the flag, but got a broken nose in the scuffle.
“What was important to me about this photo was not so much that it happened, but what happened after,” Landsmark said in a Needham Public Library lecture last Sunday. His topic: ‘‘Racism in Boston: How Far Have We Come?”
After the attack, Landsmark helped put together a series of dialogues with religious leaders, community activists and others “to talk about what really mattered in the city,” he said.
“What began to happen was that many of our corporate leaders and public officials began to say, ‘You know, there are things that we could have been doing to address these issues of racial justice within the city and things we could still do.’”
They were very small things, Landsmark said: Black and brown salespeople in Filene’s Basement, or driving MBTA buses, working as clerks in the state courts, or being hired as teachers.
“Did we make huge progress?” Landsmark asked. “No. Did we begin to make inroads in employment and in education, into many of our institutions? Yes, we did.”
Landsmark, 78, has led a life of social activism. He is currently a distinguished professor of public policy and urban affairs, and director of the Kitty and Michael Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University. He has been a faculty member or administrator at several area universities, and has worked with a succession of mayors at Boston City Hall.
Landsmark was raised in Harlem by a single mom who took him to hear Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak at The Riverside Church in New York. As a teen, he attended the 1963 March on Washington and was there during the 1965 march in Selma, Ala.
To be sure, Landsmark is no fan of court-ordered busing, saying it divorced students from their own neighborhoods and diminished the ability of parents to connect with their children’s schools and teachers.
“It’s probably time to end busing in its current form and redirect those funds into educational improvements in the individual schools,” he said.
So how are we doing today, and what does the future hold for Greater Boston and the nation?
“The harsh reality is that we haven’t accomplished much,” Landsmark said. He noted that in many of our major colleges, fewer African American and Latin students are enrolled than there were 20 years ago. Numbers of people of color working in the industries that drive the Greater Boston economy are about the same as 10 years ago. And when it comes to housing, he said Boston is either the most or second-most racially segregated city in the country.
“We’re falling short in terms of what we could be and what we hold ourselves out to be,” Landsmark said. “Given the policies that are projected to come out of Washington and that are already coming out of Washington, which are wiping out affirmative action and DEI programs, I shudder to think of the directions that we’re heading in, in terms of whether we will become a more diverse city.
“We’re obviously in very divided times,” Landsmark said. “The question is, can we find and train and really develop the mediators among us who can begin to bring us together around some of the key issues that we’re trying to deal with?”
Those mediators and peacemakers came together during the busing crisis, Landsmark said, spurred by the Boston Herald American’s Stanley Forman’s photo.
“It’s an image that carries with it a little bit of terror,” Landsmark said, “but it also carries with it a sense of hope about what it is that we can think about as we try to heal, particularly around issues of equity and social justice.”
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