Constitutionalism is what America has instead of an established church.
According to that creed's theology, racism is our original sin, the primal failing that disfigures all our good works and denies all our efforts perfection. When our first parents, the Framers, made a place for chattel slavery in their new system, they ate from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and Eden was forfeit.
The problem of relations between the races is so fundamental to the American drama that we can communicate about it with each other in precisely these sorts of metaphors. Indeed, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) invoked them in his astonishing Philadelphia address just a few weeks ago.
Louis P. Masur invites us to consider another symbolic invocation of race in an elegantly reasoned, wonderfully researched and deeply moving new book, "The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph That Shocked America."
In 1976, America's bicentennial year, newspaper readers across the country awoke to see a shocking photograph from Boston, which was in the grip of a long-running civic crisis over efforts to desegregate its schools through busing. Demonstrators had marched to city hall to protest the most recent turn in the controversy. On the way out, a 29-year-old African American attorney named Ted Landsmark turned a corner into the march and was horribly assaulted by some of its members. Stanley Forman, a photographer for the Boston Herald American, happened to be on the scene and kept snapping pictures. One of them turned out to show -- or at least, it seemed to show -- Landsmark being held by one man, while another demonstrator prepares to spear him with an American flag.
Building from the photo
It was a shocking image that seemed to encapsulate -- indeed, for many, it did encapsulate -- white resistance to civil rights. Masur, the William R. Kenan Jr. professor of American institutions and values at Trinity College, begins with that photo and its circumstances and from there builds an analysis not only of the picture and its structural and symbolic components, but also of its actual context.
He located not only Forman, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his image, but also Landsmark, Jim Kelly -- the sheet-metal worker turned politician who appeared to be holding the young lawyer for assault -- and Joseph Rakes, the young man wielding the flag as a weapon.
