Black Firefighters and the FDNY

BLACK FIREFIGHTERS AND THE FDNY:  THE STRUGGLE FOR JOBS, JUSTICE & EQUITY IN NEW YORK CITY, by David Goldberg (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017)

Review by Prof. Clarence Taylor, Professor Emeritus of History at Baruch College

In November, 2019 former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg appeared at the Christian Cultural Center, one of the largest mega- churches in the country and apologized for the Stop and Frisk program that led to hundreds of thousands of black and brown New Yorkers being stopped and searched by the police for no legitimate reason.   The former mayor claimed that he did not understand the full impact that this policy was having on black and Latino communities.  In spite of the fact that close to 90 percent of those stopped did not commit a crime and a federal court ruled that it was racist policing, Bloomberg vigorously defended it until he decided to run for president.

While Bloomberg’s stop and frisk policy has received a great deal of attention, what is less known is his opposition to the effort launched by black firefighters to end the racially discriminatory methods used to keep black and brown people as well as women out of the New York City Fire Department.  David Goldberg’s Black Firefighters and the FDNY is a fascinating work chronicling the long history of activists trying to end the exclusion of blacks from what has remained the whitest municipal agency in the city and one of the least diverse large city fire departments in the nation.  But as the Vulcan Society, a caucus of black firefighters pursued a number of avenues to end the exclusion of blacks in the department, white fire fighters, under the leadership of their union, the FDNY, and, city officials launched a crusade to maintain a lily white and practically all male agency.

The long history that this work covers includes the periods of the Great Migration, the New Negro Movement, the Depression, World War II, the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and the colorblind era.  Goldberg points out that even before the founding of the FDNY, the larger white society embraced a racist and sexist ideology insisting that firefighting was a profession for white men.  The author maintains that whites insisted that firefighting was for those who were manly, brave, and noble; traits and characteristics only found in white men. Black men on the other hand, were seen as feminine.

Goldberg describes in meticulous detail the first generation of black fighters who entered the department starting with the hiring of William Nicholson in 1898.  The first generation of black firefighters starting in the late nineteenth century challenged black inferiority and adopted an individualist approach that embraced a black manliness to overcome racial discrimination.  However, white firefighters fought hard to eradicate blacks from the force.   Black firefighters were assigned to segregated beds, forced to perform menial work in the firehouse, were taunted, and physically threatened, all in an effort to dehumanize them and force them out of the department.   Individual acts of courage, including winning fights and performing acts of heroism in the line of duty, helped early black firefighters to survive, however, such acts did nothing to halt the racist policies to keep black people out of the fire department.

The author provides a detailed history of the Vulcan Society, the first fraternal organization of black firefighters, to challenge racial segregation and racist treatment of firefighters of color. He notes that the Society worked with civil rights groups such as the NAACP and black leaders, including the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. and Councilman Benjamin Davis.  The Vulcan Society’s civil rights unionism embraced working class consciousness with pro-equality black labor protest.

Not only did the Society, Goldberg maintains, push the FDNY and city to take steps to end segregation in the department and hire more black firefighters, but it took on the firefighters’ union in an effort to get it to adopt an equal employment practice policy and other policies that would end racial practices.  Readers are enlightened on how white firefighters fought any endeavor by blacks to end racism within the FDNY.

In one of his most important arguments in the book, the author contends that although white construction workers became the symbol of the backlash, no group symbolized the backlash to civil rights and attempts to break down the wall of employment exclusion of black people and women better than white firefighters.  By the civil rights era, when overt forms of racism were no longer acceptable, white firefighters and the FDNY adopted colorblind racism to assure that the department remained white.  When the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s championed affirmative action, the FDNY and white firefighters countered by arguing for colorblindness as a means of upholding white dominance of the department.    According to the author, “white firefighters and unionists in the FDNY have remained in the vanguard of racial recalcitrance, resistance, and atavism.”  Ignoring the history of structural racism in the New York City fire department promotes the “promulgation, normalization and standardization of American myths of exceptionalism, meritocracy, and ‘color-blind’ neutrality—myths that, in turn, are used to rationalize, codify, and maintain structural racism while advancing the false narrative that America is beyond race.”

A towering figure in the history of the FDNY is Robert O. Lowery.  Under the leadership of Lowery, who would by 1965 become the first black commissioner of the fire department, the Vulcan Society played an “inside game,” attempting to influence policies of the FDNY and the city of New York to gain greater leverage for black firefighters and black New Yorkers.  The author maintains that the Vulcans intertwined civil rights with black labor rights by supporting the Brown decision and the fight to end inferior education in Harlem.  It also took part in the 1963 March for Freedom and Jobs as well as in local electoral politics, supporting, for example the candidacy of liberal Robert Wagner for Mayor.  Lowery’s links to civil rights groups and political figures led, to a large part, to climbing the ladder in the FDNY.

Despite Lowery’s position as commissioner, he failed to bring about reform because of the white backlash in the FDNY.  The 1960s was a turbulent time when it came to race.  The number of rebellions to police brutality and poor economic conditions, resulted in a white backlash.  Lowery became a target of white anger and fear that he was going to use social engineering to usurp white dominance and do away with the colorblind approach.  Whites were able to frame the inability of blacks to enter the FDNY as a problem of individual failing.  Lowery, according to the false narrative was victimizing whites for their success and rewarding blacks for their failures. The backlash was to halt Lowery’s effort to increase the number of blacks in the fire department.

But Goldberg also argues that Lowery and the Vulcan Society’s liberal integrationist approach was criticized by black firefighters who were influenced by the Black Power movement.  These black firefighters who formed the International Association of Black Professional Fire Fighters in 1970 were more interested in community control than integration.

Under the leadership of David Floyd, who became a proponent of Black Power, the Vulcans not only fought for hiring and promoting more black firefighters but also advocated community control of fire houses, which was a form of black self-determination.

However, those fighting for black progress in the FDNY consistently met a wall of resistance from white firefighters and their politically and well financed union, which refused to accept any racial reforms.  Despite the efforts on the part of the Vulcan Society in the 1960s, it was unable to end racial exclusion in the FDNY.

Goldberg notes the significance of the 1971 Supreme Court decision in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. where the court found testing requirements for employment in a North Carolina power company discriminatory and illegal because, in part, they were unrelated to the job. Moreover, a long history of institutionalized racism hindered blacks from competing on an equal plane with whites.  Black firemen in several cities saw Griggs v. Duke Power Co. as an opportunity and filed discrimination lawsuits.  The author points out that in a number of judicial lawsuits by black firefighters, including in St. Louis, David Floyd and the Vulcan Society with assistance from the NAACP decided to use the courts as a means of breaking down discrlmination.

Although by the beginning of the twenty-first century the number of black municipal workers increased in the city, the FDNY stood out as a bastion of white male privilege thanks to the firefighters’ union, the fire department and the city’s political leadership.  The author notes that by the early 2000s there were twice as many black doctors in the city than there were black firefighters.

Goldberg tells us that after the FDNY refused to take action to end the almost total racial exclusion of black people, Paul Washington, head of the Vulcan Society, filed a racial discrimination complaint in 2002 with the EEOC after the FDNY and Bloomberg showed no interest in addressing the complaints that the department’s hiring practices were racist.  Even when members of the City Council recommended solutions to hiring blacks, Bloomberg simply refused to consider them. In 2005, the Department of Justice formally filed the United States of America and the Vulcan Society vs. City of New York.

Both Bloomberg and Fire Commissioner Scoppetta, according to the federal district court, were intentionally unresponsive to the firefighters exam’s impact on blacks and “made conscious decisions to permit them to continue.”  Goldberg maintains that the court’s “preliminary 2009 ruling exposed the belligerence, recalcitrance, and hypocrisy of the FDNY and the city.” Bloomberg failed to use Equal Employment Practices Commission recommendations. The court ordered the FDNY to issue a new exam and reforms in hiring.  Eventually once Bloomberg left office, the new mayor, Bill de Blasio withdrew the city’s appeal.   The author points out that the number of blacks has slowly increased thanks to the legal action of the Vulcan Society.

David Goldberg’s Black Firefighters and the FDNY is a major contribution to what historians have called the long civil rights movement. As the author notes, New York City was a major arena of that long struggle. Key to the fight was the black working class and its focus on jobs and justice.