April 12, 2008
The Soiling of Old Glory
Louis P. Masur in Slate:
In his recent speech on race, Barack Obama spoke about the legacy of racial hatred and resentment in America. One of the events he probably had in mind was the controversy over busing that erupted in Boston in the mid-1970s. A single photograph epitomized for Americans the meaning and horror of the crisis. On April 5, 1976, at an anti-busing rally at City Hall Plaza, Stanley Forman, a photographer for the Boston Herald-American, captured a teenager as he transformed the American flag into a weapon directed at the body of a black man. It is the ultimate act of desecration, performed in the year of the bicentennial and in the shadows of Boston's Old State House. Titled The Soiling of Old Glory, the photograph appeared in newspapers around the country and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1977. The image shattered the illusion that racial segregation and hatred were strictly a Southern phenomenon. For many, Boston now seemed little different than Birmingham.
See the whole photo-essay here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 11:01 AM | Permalink
Comments
So how does racial animosity end? By government intervention? Obama spoke what he really believes about Americans instead of carefully planned campaign words, and it showed people the real Obama. See:
http://christianprophecy.blogspot.com/
Posted by: Christian Prophet | Apr 12, 2008 11:28:36 AM
If Rwanda's Hutus could find enough racial difference between themselves and Tutsis to justify slaughtering half a million with machetes back in '94, I don't hold out much hope for Celts, Nubians, Magyars, Basques and Danes to share toothbrushes, en masse, any time soon.
A future global race of mocha-mutts may be the only answer, but, then, I can see shoe-size or ear-angle becoming more than enough to work with.
Posted by: Steven Augustine | Apr 13, 2008 6:24:15 PM
Kind of a "meh" article. I'd love to know what the flag-wielding assailant is doing now.
Posted by: James Proctor | Apr 13, 2008 8:24:58 PM
James and interested others,
The then-young assailant has had a difficult life: more trouble with the law, some time on the inside, unfinished education, sporadic employment.
The man he assaulted is a lawyer with a doctoral degree in American Studies, currently a college president and Museum of Fine Arts trustee in Boston.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Apr 14, 2008 12:07:42 AM
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