The Soiling of Old Glory
There’s a fantastic article by Louis P. Masur on Digital Journalist today. It’s about an Irish-American called Kelly and an African-American from Kansas City.
Born Theodore Augustus Burrell in Kansas City in 1946, Ted Landsmark grew up in public housing in East Harlem where he took his mother’s maiden name before leaving New York.
Jim Kelly graduated South Boston High School in 1958, where he played football and learned a trade, before becoming a sheet metal worker and president of the South Boston Information Center.
On April 5, 1976 a photograph of Landsmark and Kelly appeared on the front pages of the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and San Francisco Chronicle, among many others, and inside The New York Times.
The photograph is of a white student attacking a black man with the American flag.
In Masur’s words:
The photograph presents a sickening sight. Landsmark is being grabbed from behind. He seems to be struggling to free himself as a large crowd looks on. The flag bearer’s feet are planted, his hands firmly grasping the staff, his eyes focused on his target. His hair flows back as he prepares to lunge forward. Attacker and victim are forever frozen in time, and we feel trapped beside them. We can glance away, but we cannot escape the horror of what we imagine the next instant will bring.
Kelly is not the attacker with the flag, he is the man grabbing Landsmark from behind.
The truth of the moment captured in that photograph is revealed in the article. While it’s really the story of a photograph, it tells us a lot about American cities, or one of them anyway, and the relationships between its different groups from then to now.
Read The Photograph That Shocked America, and the Victim Who Stepped Outside the Frame.
Stanley J. Forman’s photograph was to win the Pulitzer Prize.
See Also:
• Co-Existence: Kansas City and the Lebanon
• Black Shamrock and Dubya
• Irish Place Names and Illegals
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