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Ted Landsmark is a civil rights and community activist, attorney and advocate who shot to prominence as the subject of the 1977 Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph “The Soiling of Old Glory.”
He is also a beloved educator in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University and the namesake of the new Professor Ted Landsmark “Good Trouble” Award for the Best Project in Civil Rights History as part of National History Day.
The award, sponsored by the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, references the late civil rights activist and U.S. Rep. John Lewis’s quote to “never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”
“This man is really ‘good trouble,’” Maria Ivanova, director of the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, said of Landsmark. “Really ‘good trouble’ every day. And twice on Sunday.”
Three Needham High School students have created some ‘good trouble’ themselves — they visited Northeastern’s Boston campus on Wednesday to screen their documentary on the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and accept the inaugural Professor Ted Landsmark “Good Trouble” Award.
“They are really smart and their work shows it,” said Landsmark, distinguished professor of public policy and urban affairs, and director of the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern.
“They’ve chosen a challenging and difficult subject to research and produced a really thoughtful project that addresses health, social equity and race in ways that shows they’re going to be strong advocates in the future,” Landsmark said.
National History Day is an annual “science fair for history” involving high school students across the country, said Paula Sampson, a teaching and learning specialist for the Massachusetts Historical Society.
This year’s theme was “Turning Points in History,” and students had to research a historical event and make a presentation — in formats ranging from a performance to a research paper — of why this event represented that theme.
Needham High sophomores Chloe Crable, Emma Hua and Josephine Calzada chose to research the U.S. Public Health Service Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee — a government scientific study from 1932 to 1972 intended to observe the natural history of untreated syphilis. The study neither collected consent from its Black male subjects nor offered them treatment for the disease even after it was widely available.
To present their research, the students made a 10-minute documentary on the study and its effects on health policy and ethics, civil rights and more. The documentary featured historical photographs, highlighted primary sources, interviewed Erik Williams of the Human Subject Research Protection Program at Northeastern, included archival footage related to the study, and was narrated by the students.
The students won their high school competition, as well as regional and state competitions for their work, and will next present the film in Washington, D.C., for a national prize.
Calzada said that none of the students had heard of the study before conducting their research, something she found “shocking.”
But the students’ research revealed that the study still affected society today. The film discussed how health guidelines and policies were enacted to prevent a similar injustice, for instance, yet general distrust of the medical community is reflected in lower COVID vaccination rates in the Black community compared with the white community.
“We felt it was really, really relevant today not only in the policy sector, not just the civil rights sector, but it related to something that we all had experience with,” Calzada said. “We’re all part of this linear history, and with COVID we have been able to kind of connect to that.”
The research also became very emotional for the students, who received some patient records and other primary sources associated with the study.
“Reading a secondary source about it is one thing,” Crable said. “But seeing the doctors’ own handwriting and notes and stuff is something completely different.”
Hua agreed.
“Projects like this really bring history to life,” she said.
The students were also very emotional hearing the praise for their project — both for their research and their technical prowess in video editing.
Ivanova said she wanted to show the documentary to her colleagues at the Clinton School of Public Service at the University of Arkansas, including former President Bill Clinton.
The documentary features footage of Clinton apologizing to Tuskegee survivors in 1997. Hua seemed on the verge of tears of joy upon hearing the suggestion.
Landsmark concluded the event by asking the students how the project affected their outlook on medicine, race or other pressing issues today.
“It definitely adds another lens,” Calzada said. “This project really shows that behind current events, there’s hundreds of years of history.”