April 5, 1976: The Soiling of Old Glory

April 5, 1976, 50 years ago: A disgusting act of racism at City Hall in Boston, birthplace of the American Revolution, casts a shadow over the nation's Bicentennial celebrations.

The act occurs within a 2-minute walk of the Old State House, site of the Boston Massacre of 1770, which is generally considered to be the beginning of the Revolution, and a 3-minute walk of Faneuil Hall, another landmark of the Revolution. Within a 5-minute walk is the Old South Meeting House, where the Boston Tea Party got started in 1773. The Old City Hall, built in 1865, is also within a 5-minute walk.

Boston's new City Hall was built in 1969, and it has severely divided public opinion. Some people think it's wonderful. Others think it is so ugly. How ugly is it? In 2013, Paul McMorrow, a columnist for The Boston Globe, wrote:

City Hall is so ugly that its insane upside-down wedding-cake columns and windswept plaza distract from the building's true offense. Its great crime isn't being ugly; it's being anti-urban. The building and its plaza keep a crowded city at arm's length.

I have to agree. While the David D. Dinkins Municipal Building, the Beaux-Arts skyscraper a block away that serves as Manhattan's Borough Hall as well as space for various City offices, New York's City Hall, built in 1812, is short and easily accessible from street level. Philadelphia's, opening in 1901, has a clock tower that made it, for a few years, the tallest building in the world; but its ground level provides excellent access, and it even hosts the city's skating rink and Christmas market.

In contrast, to get to Boston's New City Hall, you have to climb steps, or use a handicap-accessible elevator. And there's a reason that style of architecture was, at the time, labeled "Brutalist."

But it will never be as ugly as the most famous event ever to happen there -- and I don't mean the "Yankees suck!" chant that goes up there every time a celebration is held for a Boston team winning its sport's World Championship, even if it's not the Red Sox.

In the years after the Revolution, Boston was the center of the American movement for the abolition of slavery. William Lloyd Garrison published his newspaper The Liberator at 21 Cornhill Street, espousing the cause of the abolition of slavery from 1831 until it happened in 1865. With some irony, the site of the building was wiped out to build New City Hall.

One of the most famous all-black units of the American Civil War was the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, whose memorial is across Beacon Street from the "new" State House. As recently as 1955, Boston had a role to play in the Civil Rights Movement: Martin Luther King Jr. earned his doctorate of divinity at Boston University.

But times changed. In the 1960s, fans jammed the Boston Garden to see the all-white Boston Bruins, no matter how bad they were; while the building was half-empty for the integrated Boston Celtics, until the Playoffs. Then, the Boston fans became front-runners as the Celtics won 11 NBA Championships in 13 years. Celtics star Bill Russell publicly described Boston as a "racist city."

The Boston Red Sox were the last Major League Baseball team to integrate, with Elijiah "Pumpsie" Green in 1959. The Bruins actually had a black player first, Willie O'Ree, in 1958. But the Red Sox also had Earl Wilson, the 1st black pitcher to pitch a no-hitter in the American League, in 1962; and Russell was named head coach in 1966, making him the 1st black head coach in major league sports (unless you count Fritz Pollard in the fledgling NFL in 1920). So the record is mixed.

On June 21, 1974, in the case of Morgan v. Hennigan, federal Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. ruled that Boston's public schools had to be desegregated. When the buses with black students arrived at previously all-white South Boston High School on September 12, white parents -- not kids, parents -- threw rocks at the buses.

The black kids were harassed both inside and outside the school. Finally, the black parents called on the one man they thought might have been able to reach the white people of "Southie": Senator Ted Kennedy, brother of a President and a Presidential candidate, both martyred, now the standard-bearer of Boston's, and America's, most famous Irish Catholic family.

But when he pleaded with them to leave the black students alone, they threw rocks at him. One woman yelled out, "You're a disgrace to the Irish!" Ted, for all his faults, had too much class to yell back, "You're a disgrace to the Americans!" The harassment continued into the 1975-76 schoolyear.

On April 5, 1976, Ted Landsmark, a 29-year-old civil rights attorney, born in Kansas City and raised in New York's famous black neighborhood of Harlem, went to City Hall to assist minority contractors in getting opportunities in the construction industry. He later said, "I had difficulty finding a parking space in downtown Boston, and I was running a few minutes late for the meeting in City Hall. So I was in a hurry and perhaps not paying as much attention as I might have as I approached a corner, where the young demonstrators were coming in the other direction. I did not see them until both they and I were at that corner."

There was a protest against the busing going on, and two of the white protestors saw Landsmark, knocked him down, and broke his nose.

However, what the picture seemed to show was not what was actually happening. One of the anti-busing protestors, James M. Kelly, a South Boston High School graduate, looked like he was holding Landsmark's arms to make him an easier target. In fact, he was helping Landsmark up.

The other major figure in the photo was Joseph Rakes. Looking more like a 1960s San Francisco hippie than a 1970s Boston racist, he had brought an American flag to the protest, and he was waving it. But the photo made it look like he was trying to stab Landsmark with the pointed end of the flag's pole.

Rakes later claimed he was simply waving the flag at Landsmark, and there is no video to either back up or dispute his claim. But even if this were true, it seemed to be sending a message: "This is my flag, and represents me and my people, not you and your people."

In 1824, a merchant seaman named William Driver commanded a ship on which he raised an American flag, telling his crew, "Behold, Old Glory." The flag has carried "Old Glory" as a nickname ever since, along with "The Stars & Stripes" and "The Star-Spangled Banner."

Stanley Forman of the Boston Herald American took the photograph that appeared to show Rakes trying to stab Landsmark, and it made the next day's front page. It became known as "The Soiling of Old Glory," and it took the sails out of the busing protests. These white Bostonians, so proud of their patriotism, began to see that they were taking it too far.

Stanley Forman, 2013

The image of the hippie-looking white kid appearing to assault the well-dressed black man with a flag was similar to a collegiate psychology experiment, in which a white guy with greasy hair, stubble, a T-shirt, jeans and a knife was shown holding that knife up to a black man in a nice suit, and then, at the end of the class, the professor asked the class whether the white man or the black man was holding the knife, and got a split answer.

Rakes was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon, and sentenced to two years' imprisonment and two years' probation. The jail sentence was suspended. In 1983, Rakes assaulted his sister's boyfriend, who later died from the injuries sustained in the attack. He fled prosecution, but returned in 1988 after the murder charge was dropped. Rakes carried the stigma of being known as "the flag kid," but eventually married and had children while laboring as a construction worker and later in hazardous waste.

James M. Kelly was not stigmatized by his presence in the photo. He was elected to the City Council in 1984, and was continually re-elected until his death in 2007.

Landsmark parlayed the attention to increase awareness on the racial unrest in Boston. He was later hired by Mayor Raymond Flynn -- another graduate of South Boston High -- to improve youth and workforce development in the city. He taught at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Boston campus of the University of Massachusetts, and the Massachusetts College of Art. From 1997 to 2014, he was president of Boston Architectural College. He left that post when another Mayor, Marty Walsh, named him to the board of directors for the Boston Planning and Development Agency.

Ted Landsmark, 2024

As of April 5, 2026, Landsmark, Rakes and Forman are still alive. In a 2016 interview, Landsmark said that he and Rakes had never met again after the incident, the way some such meetings have been conducted, as with the Little Rock Nine and their tormentors after 1957 Arkansas, or the descendants of Homer Plessy and Judge John Ferguson to commemorate their court case.