Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 17, 1994 TAG: 9404170027
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GLEN JOHNSON ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: BOSTON LENGTH: Medium
The picture won a Pulitzer Prize. Now, 18 years later, one of the attackers has come forward to apologize to Ted Landsmark.
Bobby Powers, who wasn't the person with the flag on April 5, 1976, met twice with Landsmark at Christmastime and admitted being the one who instigated the attack at City Hall Plaza.
"If Bobby's visit has any meaning to me, it's that change occurs over 20 years and reconciliation is possible," Landsmark said.
Powers, with about 120 fellow white residents of the Charlestown neighborhood, was leaving City Hall after an anti-busing meeting with a city councilor. The whites opposed having blacks bused to their schools as part of a desegregation plan.
Landsmark, then 29, was on his way to City Hall to lead a meeting in his capacity as executive director of the Contractors' Association of Boston. The trade group worked to secure city construction contracts for minority builders.
As the young, irritated whites crossed paths with the lone black man dressed in a three-piece suit, violence erupted.
The mob broke Landsmark's nose, and the flag staff struck a glancing blow across his face when a man jabbed it at him like a bayonet.
"Even though my glasses had been knocked off, I could see it coming and I leaned back. It missed me by inches," recalled Landsmark, now 47.
Since that day, Landsmark, a Yale graduate and lawyer, has held positions in higher education and in two mayoral administrations. He runs a human service program for Mayor Thomas Menino.
Little is known of most of the whites. Powers, though, has battled legal and personal problems and has tried repeatedly to come to grips with his troubles.
One step in that direction was to pay an unannounced visit on Landsmark Landsmark's City Hall office and introduce himself. He's visited Landsmark again since then.
Calls to Powers went unanswered, and he couldn't be found at an address given for him. In a recent interview with the Boston Herald, he said of the 1976 confrontation:
"I saw this guy coming, and I gave him a side kick. I tripped him up, and I got out of the way. Then the jackals attacked him."
Through the next 18 years, Powers carried the guilt for Landsmark's injuries and the shame they cast on the city. He said it felt like a "burlap T-shirt" he wasn't able to take off.
Powers said part of the strength to overcome that burden came from watching his own son grow up.
"I wanted to make amends. I'm not a hateful person," he told the Herald.
Landsmark keeps a gift from Powers amid the bric-a-brac on his desk: a framed photograph of Powers and his son. He said Powers' visit is an indication of changes in a city that still experiences racial tensions.
"A third of the people who live here now didn't in 1976. The city now is dramatically more diverse than it was in 1976," he said.
Landsmark sees Powers' visit as a signal of how important it is to move forward. He refuses to pose at the site of the attack, though it's less than 100 yards from his office.
"It's easy to try to freeze a life or an event or a city at one point in time because the photographer was there at one moment," he said.
by CNB