Why the American Flag?

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

[BlueEyedSon]

1. your DU name answers the question, no?

[Deja Q]

2. Context. A still image lacks the context and is open to interpretation.

Still, there are few interpretations to that picture and none of them is very nice at all.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

4. The photo is from the anti-busing riots in Boston during the 70's.

http://www.smithsonianmagazine.com/issues/2006/april/indelible.htm

The incident on Boston’s City Hall Plaza took no more than 15 seconds, Ted Landsmark recalls. He was set upon and punched; someone swung an American flag at him; his attackers fled; he glanced down at his suit. “I realized I was covered with blood, and at that moment I understood that something quite significant had happened.”

What had happened was partly an accident of timing—a collision between a man walking to a meeting and young protesters out to make a point, a skirmish in Boston’s epic confrontation over court-ordered busing to desegregate the city’s public schools. But in Stanley J. Forman’s photograph, the symbolism of the moment—the anger, the flag, the staggered figure that happened to be Ted Landsmark—seemed to epitomize the frustrations and grievances of a city on the edge.

Boston’s battle over busing dominated local civic life for more than a decade following a federal judge’s 1974 order to desegregate the schools. (The judge, W. Arthur Garrity, withdrew from the case 16 years later.) Forman, then a photographer for the Boston Herald American, had covered the issue from the start. “I was there for every bad thing that happened,” he says, “and this was the climax of it—of everything bad that can happen when you live in a town that is so heated up.”

On that day, April 5, 1976, Forman went to City Hall Plaza to photograph a demonstration by students opposed to busing. After taking a few pictures of the protesters, he glanced over his shoulder. “I saw this black man coming around the corner and a bell went off in my head,” he says. “And I said, ‘They’re going to get him!’ I didn’t think they would get him with the flag.”

...

[RagingInMiami]

3. That's an interesting photo

What's going on there?

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

5. See post #4 above, and linked story.

[Minnesota Libra]

6. Too bad you picked out such a questionable photo. nt

[Warpy]

7. Because it was hanging over a nearby building (this is City Hall

Plaza in Boston) and it provided a ready weapon for this racist punk, that's why.

I remember the story all too well.

[Lefty48197]

8. Reminds me of the Crusaders' swords with crosses emblazed on them

.