An Antibusing Confrontation in Boston
Where busing was implemented, it often faced stiff resistance. Many white communities resented judges dictating which children would attend which neighborhood school. In working-class Irish South Boston, mobs attacked African American students bused in from Roxbury in 1974. A police presence was required to keep South Boston High School open. When lawyer and civil rights activist Ted Landsmark tried to enter Boston’s city hall during a 1976 antibusing demonstration, he was assaulted. Stanley Forman’s Pulitzer Prize–winning photo for the Boston Herald-American — titled The Soiling of Old Glory — shows Joseph Rakes lunging at Landsmark with an American flag. Busing also had the perverse effect of speeding up “white flight” to city suburbs. Pulitzer Prize, 1977, www.stanleyformanphotos.com.