Tonight, I’ve been catching up with my reading at the online American magazine, Slate. I was particularly captivated by their slideshow on the anti-busing rallies in Boston in 1976 (long after the Civil Rights Movement began). It was an ugly episode, it goes without saying. The nightmarish photo below earned the photographer, Stanley J. Forman, the 1977 Pulitzer Prize. As you look at it, you can see why the photo, called The Soiling of Old Glory, won the prize – it captured a white youth transforming the American flag into a weapon directed at a black lawyer.

You would think that, in this day and age, the issue of segregration and desegregation was no longer an issue. Wrong. As the slideshow points out:

In 2006, when Deval Patrick became the first black governor of Massachusetts, the Boston Globe expressed hope that his inauguration would “finally wash away the shameful stain of that day in 1976.” Last June, however, a Supreme Court ruling forbade school districts from assigning students based on their race, and Patrick’s administration has been forced to find ways to avoid dismantling desegregation programs throughout Massachusetts. The issue, and the photograph, continue to haunt Boston, and the nation.

Here’s hoping that if Barack Obama wins not only the Presidential nomination but the Presidency itself, America might finally realise that being dark-skinned is not an abomination or evil or whatever silly story it is that white supremacists and other racist ratbags peddle.

As for the other photos in the slideshow, the one that made me look at it for ages was the picture of the woman and child freefalling out a window when their apartment block caught fire. There is a cruel beauty in that particular photo, and I wonder what you think.