Theodore Landsmark condemns violence and racism after the attack at city hall plaza

Video clip, click here.

Video of Landsmark

Joseph Rakes

Joseph Rakes was seventeen years old the day of the protest at city hall. He is the young man portrayed in "The Soiling of Old Glory," attempting to spear Theodore Landsmark with an American flag. Rakes says "blind anger motivated me... When the busing started, it was, 'You can't have half your friends'- that's the way it was put towards us. They took half the guys and girls I grew up with and said, 'You're going to school on the other side of town.' Nobody understood it at [age] fifteen."

Rakes' actions at City Hall Plaza led to a conviction for assault with a deadly weapon and a two-year suspended sentence. 

Rakes is currently a labor forman living in Maine. He said in a recent interview "The picture-it says what it says, but it doesn't tell the whole story. You know, there's nothing I can do about it. I just move on in my life."

Theodore Landsmark

Theodore Landsmark was born May 17, 1946 in Kansas City, Missouri. He moved to New York as a child, where he attended Stuyvesant High School and St. Paul's Preparatory. He attended Yale for college, where he earned a BA in political science, before continuing on to Yale's law school. A veteran of civil rights advocacy, Landsmark had marched from Selma, Alabama to Montomery, Alabama in a civil rights march, and had also attended Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral.  

On April 5, 1976, Landsmark was going to a meeting at City Hall. As he entered City Hall Plaza, a protester spotted him and yelled a racial slur at him. Another protester punched Landsmark and he fell to the ground. As he got up, Joseph Rakes came after him with and American Flag and hit him with it several times. This entire incident lasted between fifteen and twenty seconds.

The attack broke Landsmark's nose, as shown in the photograph above. At the hospital, Landsmark requested that his nose be bandaged in a way to draw maximum attention.

At a press conference he held two days after the incident, Landsmark said he did not blame the students who attacked him. He labeled them as "poor, working-class victims of a system that used race to mask deeper economic divisions in American society." 

The incident turned Landsmark into a local celebrity and he became a spokesman for racial tolerance. 

Landsmark is currently a lawyer in Jamaica Plain.

"The Soiling of Old Glory"

Photo by Stanley J. Forman depicting Joseph Rakes, a 17-year-old South Boston Teen, attacking Theodore Landsmark, a lawyer, with an American flag at a rally at City Hall Plaza on April 5, 1976.