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Also go to The Soiling of Old Glory by Scott McLemee.
Jim
Stanley J. Forman - The Soiling of Old Glory by Louis P. Masur
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.
Louis P. Masur
