Boston’s attitude on race relations has been summed up for much of the last 40 years in Stanley Forman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photo, “The soiling of Old Glory.”

Shortly after that picture of Ted Landsmark being attacked with an American flag ran in the Boston Herald American, the Banner ran another: of the bandaged city official vowing to stay in his job and crediting Deputy Mayor Jeep Jones, also black, with coming to his aid when no one else did.

If there seemed little hope in the court-ordered busing crisis epitomized by the incident, a glimmer came with the election of John D. O’Bryant to the Boston School Committee in 1977. He would rise to the presidency of the longtime South Boston-dominated body when district representation came to the city electoral districts in 1983.

Yet in a one-step-forward, two-steps-back moment, Massachusetts, and the nation, would lose its highest ranking black public official in when two-term U.S. Sen. Ed Brooke was defeated in 1978 after liberal Democrats campaigned against the Republican war veteran.

It wasn’t just the Senate turning all-white that year. Boston and New England were rocked by the Blizzard of ’78, an equal-opportunity show of nature’s fury, though disproportionately affecting poorer areas of the city.

That same year, Northeastern University opened the African American Master Artists-in-Residency Program. And black businesses saw advances during the period, with minority interests gaining a foothold in a re-licensed Channel 7, architects Stull and Lee quietly making a mark with projects like the Harriet Tubman House, and Cruz Construction and Long Bay Management making significant headway in real estate development.

Electoral excitement would reach a crescendo in the 1983 mayoral race in which state Rep. Mel King would emerge as a leading contender to become Boston’s first black mayor. A Banner analysis showing the statistical improbability of attaining that goal, and its endorsement in the preliminary of a white candidate sensitive to African-American interests, sparked protests against the paper. The paper ultimately backed King in the general election. King then lost to South Boston’s Ray Flynn by a nearly two-to-one margin.