Black Firefighters and the FDNY: The Struggle for Jobs, Justice, and Equity in New York City

BLACK FIREFIGHTERS AND THE FDNY

JUSTICE, POWER, AND POLITICS

Coeditors

Heather Ann Thompson

Rhonda Y. Williams

Editorial Advisory Board

Peniel E. Joseph

Matthew D. Lassiter

Daryl Maeda

Barbara Ransby

Vicki L. Ruiz

Marc Stein

The Justice, Power, and Politics series publishes new works in history that explore the myriad struggles for justice, battles for power, and shifts in politics that have shaped the United States over time. Through the lenses of justice, power, and politics, the series seeks to broaden scholarly debates about America’s past as well as to inform public discussions about its future.

More information on the series, including a complete list of books published, is available at http://justicepowerandpolitics.com/.

BLACK FIREFIGHTERS AND THE FDNY

The Struggle for Jobs, Justice, and Equity in New York City

DAVID GOLDBERG

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

Chapel Hill

© 2017 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Cover photo courtesy of Vincent Julius, in author’s collection

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Goldberg, David A., 1972– author.

Title: Black firefighters and the FDNY : the struggle for jobs, justice, and equity in New York City / by David Goldberg.

Other titles: Justice, power, and politics.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2017] | Series: Justice, power, and politics | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017026942| ISBN 9781469633626 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469633633 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: African American fire fighters—Employment—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. | African Americans—Civil rights—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. | Fire departments—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. | New York (N.Y.). Fire Department—History—20th century. | New York (N.Y.). Fire Department. Vulcan Society—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC TH9505.N5 G63 2017 | DDC 331.6/39607307471—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017026942

For

Jacob Fulcher, Vincent Julius, John Ruffins, David Floyd, Arthur Smokestack Hardy

&

Beth, Civia, and Oscar

Contents

Abbreviations and Acronyms in the Text

Introduction

1 The Early Origins of Ethnic Insularity and Racial Exclusion in the New York City Fire Department

2 The Bravest of the Brave: New York’s First Generation of Black Firefighters, 1898–1934

3 Fighting a Good Fight: The Formation of the Vulcan Society, 1932–1945

4 Postwar Civic and Civil Rights Unionism: The Vulcan Society’s Golden Age, 1946–1963

5 A Black Face in a High Place, Fire Commissioner Robert O. Lowery: Reform, Retrenchment, and the Limitations of Racial Liberalism

6 From Black Power to Class Action: The International Association of Black Professional Firefighters and the Rise of Fire Department Discrimination Litigation

7 The Last Bastion of White Male Privilege: Race, Gender, and the FDNY, 1977–1999

8 Free at Last? Black Firefighters and the FDNY in the Twenty-First Century

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Abbreviations and Acronyms in the Text

BLACK FIREFIGHTERS AND THE FDNY

Introduction

In a historic 2012 decision, Eastern District Court Judge Nicholas Garaufis ruled that the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) had knowingly and intentionally implemented and maintained racially discriminatory hiring processes throughout its history. The case, United States and Vulcan Society v. City of New York (U.S. v. City of New York), developed out of a 2002 federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) complaint filed by FDNY captain Paul Washington—at the time the president of the Vulcan Society, the oldest and largest Black firefighters’ organization in the nation—on behalf of New York’s Black firefighters as well as minority residents, past and present, who were systemically excluded from the department by these policies and practices. Assisted by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the law firm of Levy Ratner, Washington’s EEOC complaint focused largely on the historic and ongoing discriminatory intent and impact of the written examinations used to rank applicants and determine eligibility to advance to the next stages of the hiring process. Despite a mountain of overwhelming evidence that showed that the test, eligibility ranking system, and hiring process as a whole were blatantly discriminatory, the city and the FDNY failed to acknowledge or accept responsibility and stubbornly refused to institute reforms in compliance with standing employment discrimination laws, standards, and regulations. The recalcitrance and repeated unwillingness of the city and the FDNY to negotiate in good faith eventually led the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to intervene in the case. In 2007, the DOJ joined with the Vulcan Society, the CCR, and a class of recent minority applicants and filed formal racial discrimination charges against the city and the FDNY in federal court.¹

The case proceeded at a snail’s pace, dragging on for nearly a decade. The City of New York spent millions in public funds defending the procedures, policies, recruitment methods, and testing and screening mechanisms that had made the FDNY the least racially representative major urban fire department in the nation. This continued even after the case was finally decided, as the city and the FDNY, in conjunction with white rank-and-file firefighters and the Uniformed Firefighters Association (UFA), continued to oppose, delay, impede, and contest the scope and content of the court’s decision and pending relief order.²

In 2014, after a year and a half of postverdict legal wrangling, delays, protests, and counterprotests, newly elected mayor Bill de Blasio finally settled the case. De Blasio agreed to pay $98 million in back wages and damages to minority firefighters and applicants whose careers were either delayed or thwarted by the city’s and the FDNY’s usage of discriminatory hiring practices from 1999 to 2007. The settlement, reached shortly before the judge was scheduled to rule on damages, required the city to pay the plaintiffs’ legal expenses and called for a court-appointed monitor to oversee the development of nondiscriminatory entrance examinations, the creation of new hiring and recruitment protocols and practices, and the establishment of an independent, well-funded, and appropriately staffed equal employment opportunity office in the FDNY to enforce employment discrimination law and the court’s ruling and to prohibit retaliatory acts, institutional indifference, or backsliding.³

Since World War II, the percentage of Black firefighters hired during each four-year hiring cycle rarely strayed beyond a range of 1 to 5 percent. However, since U.S. v. City of New York, Black applicants—who previously would have been disqualified or buried at the bottom of the eligibility list—have been hired at an unprecedented rate. In fact, more Black firefighters have been appointed to the FDNY since 2013 than were hired during the thirty-year period prior (1983–2013). This influx has facilitated a significant demographic and cultural shift within the department. In 2016, for example, the FDNY experienced a historic first when Engine 234 in Crown Heights—captained by former Vulcan Society president Paul Washington—became the first fire company staffed by a Black majority in the 150-year history of the department.⁴

U.S. v. City of New York dislodged a number of the departmental policies, practices, and procedures used previously to restrict minority access and representation and to institutionalize and codify color-blind racism in the FDNY. While these were critical and highly significant reforms, the recent increase in the number and percentage of Black firefighters in the FDNY is merely a drop in the bucket and has had little impact on closing the FDNY’s vast racial disparity gap. This point was reiterated by Paul Washington, who in an effort to counter departmental officials claiming that the FDNY turned a corner on diversity, provided a degree of perspective by explaining that Engine 234 was merely one of 300 fire companies in the FDNY. Black firefighters, Washington has noted, continue to be an aberration in the department and remain grossly underrepresented.⁵

The percentage of Blacks hired by the FDNY has more than doubled but lags far behind the percentage of Black residents (roughly 25 percent) in New York. Not only has racial underrepresentation remained firmly intact, but it shows no sign of abating anytime soon. Even if Black firefighters are eventually hired at a rate of 25 percent, Washington argued, it would still have a very limited and slow impact on the overall racial composition of the FDNY and couldn’t be considered equitable restitution or an adequate amount of justice for 150 years of racial exclusion.⁶

Despite its limitations, U.S. v. City of New York was nonetheless a momentous and historic victory in a struggle in which victories had been few and far between. Black access to and representation within the FDNY has increased in the years since, and many of the long-standing institutional barriers constructed to exclude minorities and women have been publicly acknowledged, brought to light, and dismantled. U.S. v. City of New York didn’t eliminate racism or sexism or facilitate racial and gender equity, but it did mark a critical turning point and a new stage of development for Black firefighters and the Vulcan Society by providing an important legal precedent and benchmark upon which future generations of Black firefighters could build. Moreover, the Vulcan Society members and Black firefighters responsible for bringing discrimination charges before the court built upon and paid homage to the work and struggles of prior generations of Vulcan Society members who had led the way by fighting against discrimination and racism during their respective eras and, in the process, established the tradition of militancy, resistance, and organizational strength that provided contemporary Black firefighters with the tools to advance their multifaceted, multigenerational struggle to make the FDNY reflective of and responsive to the people and communities it serves.

In 1973, New York’s Vulcan Society had been one of the first Black firefighters’ organizations to bring a fire department discrimination case to federal court. Their lawsuit, Vulcan Society Inc., et al. v. Civil Service Commission, et al., was heard by a federal district court judge who ruled that the FDNY, the personnel department, and the city were guilty of utilizing an illegal, discriminatory hiring process that disproportionately excluded Black and Latino applicants from securing jobs with the department. While the judge had ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, he opted to narrowly tailor his decision and relief order by refusing to consider that the FDNY had used variations of these same methods for generations, limiting his ruling to only one particular examination and hiring process. By doing so, the judge avoided ordering a sustained affirmative action program for the FDNY and instead narrowly tailored affirmative relief to protect the individual rights of white applicants in the long term.⁷

While the Vulcan Society helped pioneer legal action, it had little to show for it. Conversely, Black firefighters’ organizations elsewhere followed their lead and filed their own lawsuits during the mid-1970s, a period with a far more hospitable legal and political climate. Affirmative action became widely accepted and broadly applied as the standard remedy in fire department discrimination lawsuits. This shift, which took place within the course of a year or two, was aided by the DOJ, which assumed a far more active role in fire department discrimination cases, negotiating consent decree settlements with city governments that allowed municipalities to avoid being found guilty or going on the record to defend indefensible policies and practices by agreeing to institute long-term affirmative action programs. These agreements limited the legal costs, monetary damages, and back pay cities were responsible for. When cities refused to negotiate or accept the terms of proposed settlements, the DOJ intervened on behalf of the plaintiffs and brought its resources, influence, and authority to bear on these cases and their rulings.⁸

Despite its increased involvement—or perhaps because of it—the DOJ was stretched thin during this period and directly intervened in only a select number of lawsuits. Deluged with a backlog of racial discrimination cases and further limited by a lack of funding, the DOJ focused on the most egregious, clear-cut, and easily winnable fire department discrimination cases. In the 1980s, though, the DOJ abruptly switched sides, joining with white firefighters and fire unions as they attempted to appeal, overturn, or delay prior rulings, relief orders, and consent agreements. Despite the DOJ’s protracted but shifting involvement in fire department litigation, it continually refused to intervene in discrimination cases filed against the FDNY before finally doing so in the early twenty-first century.⁹

The FDNY—particularly since 9/11—is frequently celebrated and championed as a beacon of freedom, bravery, teamwork, brotherhood, and the American Spirit, even though it has been the least racially representative major urban fire department in the country for most of the last forty years. Unlike most other fire departments and other segments of New York’s municipal sector—including the New York City Police Department (NYPD)—the FDNY remained closed to racial minorities and women long after federal and local equal employment opportunity laws and mandates were solidified and reinforced in the courts during the 1970s and 1980s. While other municipal departments experienced significant shifts due to changing urban demographics and the institutionalization and codification of these initiatives, the FDNY stubbornly and repeatedly refused to comply with civil rights laws, federal and municipal equal employment opportunity standards and requirements, the city council, the DOJ, and the federal judiciary.¹⁰

Ironically, minority representation in the FDNY started declining immediately after the Vulcan Society’s 1973 legal victory in Vulcan Society v. Civil Service Commission. As other cities instituted long-term, race-based hiring goals and affirmative action programs that would dramatically remake the racial composition of their respective fire departments, the FDNY not only avoided the implementation of affirmative action but refused to acknowledge the existence of discrimination even after it had lost a series of racial and gender discrimination lawsuits throughout the 1970s and 1980s. As a result, the FDNY went from being one of the most racially progressive urban fire department in the nation to the least over the course of one decade. Long considered to be a model of successful racial integration, by the 1980s the FDNY became notorious for its insularity, racism, sexism, and conservatism and has since developed a well-deserved national reputation as a last bastion of white male exclusivity and privilege.¹¹

The history of the FDNY is a microcosm of the contradictory and warring tensions and ideals that are at the core of racism as well as our schizophrenic, unstable, and mythical national identity. Like the country as a whole, the city of New York and the FDNY have sought to define and maintain the department’s heroic and celebrated public image by dismissing, downplaying, or attempting to justify the persistence of structural and overt forms of racism. The FDNY is the largest and most storied, revered, and respected fire department in the world, but it is also the prototypical example of the dialectically opposed and contradictory traditions and tensions that have shaped firefighting as well as the highly racialized and gendered culture of urban fire departments in the United States—bravery, engaged citizenship, mutual dependence, selflessness, merit, benevolence, and sacrifice, as well as nativism, ethnic chauvinism, job protectionism, insularity, political patronage and corruption, sexism, and racism.

Located in America’s largest and most influential urban metropolis, the FDNY historically set the standard for cities and fire departments, both in the United States and around the globe. In 1865, the FDNY became the first full-time, paid, professional fire department in the country. Since then, almost every major innovation in urban firefighting has originated in the FDNY. The department has always had the largest operating budget and firefighting force in the U.S. and has used these resources to test and integrate technological advancements, improve firefighting efficiency, decrease response times, protect firefighters, and devise new means to better serve and protect the public’s safety. During the 1960s and 1970s, for example, the FDNY was one of the first fire departments to implement the nascent field of fire science to craft data and information-based operational and tactical reforms and protocols, an approach that became standardized in other cities in subsequent years. But in retrospect, these innovative technocratic reforms were highly problematic and racially and economically biased, and they utterly devastated New York’s low-income, minority communities, their residents, and the city’s public heath for decades.¹²

The FDNY’s administrative, institutional, and racial policies and practices have also been both highly influential and inequitable. New York’s civil service and personnel departments, the FDNY, fire officers, and white rank-and-file firefighters colluded to craft institutional policies and practices that were designed to circumvent civil service reforms enacted by the La Guardia administration during the late 1930s. This was done to exclude or limit nonwhite access to the department through racially neutral, bureaucratic means that emphasized culture and individual merit rather than overt racism or explicitly stated discriminatory intent. Thus while positioning itself as a proponent of equal opportunity, fairness, racial neutrality, individual merit, and equitable job mobility, the FDNY simultaneously implemented, maintained, and vigorously defended exclusionary and discriminatory hiring and promotional processes that were codified to ensure that the department would remain lily-white.

The dominant racial ideology and discourse within the FDNY began shifting after World War II and quickly evolved into an early manifestation and defense of color-blind racism, a permutation of racism in America that later became hegemonic nationally during the late 1960s and 1970s as whites organized in opposition to civil rights laws and affirmative action by arguing that both went too far, unfairly discriminated against whites, and constituted a form of reverse racism against whites. White individuals and institutions that had openly advocated white supremacy and racism for generations suddenly professed a newfound, religious-like zeal for upholding Dr. King’s Dream by maintaining a color-blind society where race wasn’t a factor and people were judged based on the content of one’s character rather than the color of one’s skin. FDNY administrators and the fire unions anticipated this discursive sleight of hand long before Richard Nixon’s Silent Majority, presenting themselves as the embodiment of traditional American values, color-blind meritocracy, heroic white manhood, and individualism and as victims rather than beneficiaries of liberal social engineering and racial discrimination.¹³

While white construction workers, or the hard hats, often serve as an archetype for white working-class resentment and backlash during the late 1960s and early 1970s, no group of white workers better exemplifies the prolonged nature of white resistance and recalcitrance to Black equality more than white firefighters and their politically powerful and influential union, the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF). From the 1970s to the early 1990s, the IAFF filed and funded more reverse-discrimination cases than any other union in the country. While white firefighters across the country played a central role in countermovements that opposed civil rights laws and affirmative action, white firefighters and unionists in the FDNY have remained in the vanguard of racial recalcitrance, resistance, and atavism. New York’s IAFF local, the UFA—unlike fire unions elsewhere—managed to effectively thwart substantive racial reforms as well as numerous attempts to force the department to comply with standing civil rights laws and local and federal equal employment opportunity rules, regulations, and requirements through the courts.¹⁴

The history of racial exclusion and structural racism in the FDNY shows how white institutional and discursive control allows for omissions and distortions that enable 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. The FDNY is a singularly important site from which to explore this phenomenon, as both Black resistance and organizing efforts and white countermovements radiated outward from New York and influenced struggles for jobs, justice, and racial equality and equity across the country.

Black firefighters in the FDNY responded to departmental racism by building and maintaining a dynamic, multifocal, century-long struggle against racism and underrepresentation in the FDNY. In doing so, they created an institutional foundation for Black firefighters’ self-organization (the Vulcan Society) and established a tradition of resistance, militancy, and race consciousness that made intergenerational activism, civic and community-centered coalition building, and the immersion and intersection of their struggle with local and national Black freedom movements over time and space possible and sustainable. New York’s Vulcan Society was the first organization of its kind in the nation, and it served as a template for Black civil servants in New York and Black firefighters in other cities. At the same time, New York’s fire department became a laboratory that was used by whites, both within and outside the FDNY, to enact, define, apply, institutionalize, redefine, justify, and deny racism at various points of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The FDNY, white firefighters, and officials in New York’s municipal bureaucracy, in turn, played a formative role in the evolution of color-blind racism, the usage of cultural deficiency and the skills gap to rationalize gross racial disparities, and helped create the ideological and institutional basis for white victimization claims that remain an integral component of American racial discourse, politics, and injustice to this day.

Black Firefighters and the FDNY interrogates the vast gulf that exists between the FDNY’s mythology and its history by reconstructing the latter through the lens of New York’s Black firefighters, residents, and activists and their experiences and encounters with the department since the late nineteenth century. Standard, heroic accounts of the FDNY largely portray Black men and women as silent and invisible, an image that became hegemonic due to prolonged white institutional and narrative control of the department and its history. Black Firefighters and the FDNY challenges and exposes these myths by correcting, filling in, complicating, and questioning the implications of the numerous silences, gaps, and omissions used to deny, ignore, or downplay racial and gender exclusion and overt and structural racism and sexism in the FDNY. As I show, racism and sexism not only have been present throughout the department’s history but permeated every aspect of the FDNY and its work culture.

Utilizing a wide array of source material including oral histories, newspaper articles, photographs, municipal records, political ephemera, personal papers, union newsletters and records, court depositions, testimony, and legal briefs, in Black Firefighters and the FDNY I chronicle the long struggle for jobs, justice, and racial equity within the FDNY from the late nineteenth century to the present. Fusing together Black social, social movement, and political history with urban, labor, legal, and gender studies, I provide a social, political, and bureaucratic history of the FDNY and racial politics in New York City as well as a detailed case study of Black firefighters in New York and the Vulcan Society’s political, ideological, strategic, and organizational history. I pay particular attention to the careers of several highly influential leaders of the Vulcan Society who were active during different but often overlapping eras of the organization’s history—Wesley Williams, Robert O. Lowery, Vincent Vinnie Julius, David Floyd, and Paul Washington. I do so as a means to examine how different generations responded to the distinct imperatives, conditions, tensions, adjustments, and racial, social, political, and economic contexts that different generations of Black firefighters and the Vulcan Society faced without diminishing the importance of organizing, strategy, tactics, and timely and effective leadership.

Black firefighters’ struggles for economic, workplace, and social justice were fought on many different fronts. The FDNY remained an important and highly symbolic site for Black activism since the late nineteenth century and served as an incubator for the formation of the Vulcan Society. The Vulcan Society was a fraternal, civic, labor, and advocacy organization for Black firefighters that incorporated Black working-class traditions of self-organization and autonomy. Existing outside the mainline, white-dominated labor movement, the Vulcan Society joined struggles for racial, economic, labor, and social justice that were intertwined and reciprocal rather than mutually exclusive, distinctive, or isolated. As municipal employees paid by public tax dollars, Black firefighters were highly symbolic representatives of municipal government and the political establishment as well as Black New Yorkers who lived, worked, and struggled for justice and dignity within political structures and institutions controlled and dominated by whites. Due to the inherently political nature of firefighting—and public sector work generally—Black firefighters and Black activists in New York combined an array of strategies and tactics and attempted to influence and reform public policy through electoral politics; through independent, race-based, and community-centered labor organizing; and by directly engaging with—and within—New York’s Black public sphere, civic affairs, and local and national freedom struggles. Black Firefighters and the FDNY is a case study, but it situates the history of the Vulcan Society and Black firefighters in New York within the context of the Great Migration, the New Negro movement, the Depression era, World War II and the fight for Double Victory, the Cold War, the modern civil rights movement, the community control and Black Power movements, and the rise of color-blind racism, racism without racists, and neoliberalism during the post–civil rights era.¹⁵

Black firefighters’ long struggle for racial equity and justice in the FDNY shaped—and was shaped by—the evolution and shifting contours of as well as the tensions, linkages, and ruptures between Black social movements over time and space. Shifting historical currents and contexts altered and informed the tactics and strategies employed by New York’s Black firefighters and influenced how racism, racial equality, equal opportunity, rights, citizenship, merit, discrimination, integration, access, community engagement and control, Blackness, whiteness, racial justice, restitution, freedom, and power were interpreted, understood, or framed at different junctures in history. By historicizing both Black activism and racism simultaneously, this book chronicles how, when, and why white backlash, color-blind racism, and reverse discrimination emerged in the FDNY and the impact this development had on the struggle for racial justice in the FDNY as well as in America’s racial lexicon. I argue that this discursive and ideological shift in the way whites interpreted, redefined, and attempted to frame and narrow the scope and content of racism was a defensive, reactionary response to the Vulcan Society’s organizational strength, effectiveness, sustained resistance, and political acumen as well as the growth, strength, and influence of Black freedom movement demands for greater access, control, and power within white-dominated institutions like the FDNY that operated within and among Black communities and residents.

While this push for community control, self-determination, and Black Power echoed national and international patterns, the staunch resistance of New York’s municipal leaders and administrators, the FDNY, white fire officers, and white firefighters to racial reform efforts and calls for greater Black representation hinged upon the ability of whites to regain control of the narrative and to claim to be victims of racism rather than its defenders or beneficiaries. This effort to redefine and tailor how racism was discussed and understood is an example of frontlash, which scholar Velsa Weaver describes as a reactionary effort to discount earlier conceptions of racism and racial justice in order to proscribe or shift future policy options. In the FDNY, frontlash began in the post–World War II era and was foundational to the development of what sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva described as racism without racists. This currently hegemonic variety of racism and racial oppression has limited racism to overt, explicitly stated, individual acts of discrimination and blames the victims of structural racism by attributing gross racial disparities and discriminatory impacts to a lack of individual accountability and personal responsibility and a culture of poverty. This, in turn, reproduces, widens, and reinforces preexisting racial inequities and racial disparities as it de-racializes, justifies, legitimizes, normalizes, and denies the presence and persistence of structural racism.¹⁶

In the last few decades, scholarship on the Black freedom struggle has grown exponentially in scope and sophistication, expanding and enhancing our understanding of African American history, Black freedom movements, and social movements more broadly. New works have pushed the boundaries of Black freedom studies beyond their formerly narrow confines, which were often centered on struggles to secure social equality, the vote, and civil rights legislation or on mainstream, politically oriented, male-led national civil rights organizations. The recent flowering of revisionist scholarship, however, provided a number of important correctives and has addressed previous omissions and erasures by examining Black struggles for jobs and justice, not just political rights; grassroots local organizing efforts that nurtured local organizing traditions and fought for community control and Black self-determination, not just integration and desegregation; freedom struggles in the North and West, not just the South; grassroots and local organizing and leadership, not just national civil rights organizations, national campaigns, or movement spokesmen; and the centrality and importance of gender, Black women, and intersectional analysis, rather than viewing race, class, and gender in isolation or as being mutually exclusive.¹⁷

A number of these works share a common interest in re-periodizing and re-contextualizing the spatial and temporal boundaries of the Black freedom struggle and utilize a long civil rights movement approach. Labor historians and those interested in the history of the Black radical tradition have used this framework to recover the working-class orientation, radicalism, and interracial, economic justice–oriented origins of the long civil rights movement. Locating the origins of the civil rights movement in the 1930s, several of these studies emphasize the connection between the growth of the left, interracial industrial unionism, and New Deal liberalism and the rise of Black working-class militancy, direct action protests, and struggles for jobs and justice.¹⁸ While a number of these works emphasize the influence of the white left on the evolution of Black politics and working-class militancy during the 1930s and 1940s, others have instead emphasized Black working-class self-activity, exploring the increased political influence Blacks were able to wield by adapting their own traditions of cultural and political resistance to create a distinctive brand of working-class politics. By blending these traditions while adapting the tactics, institutions, and ideologies of others, members of the Black working class addressed the historical experiences they encountered by formulating their own freedom dreams, independent politics, tactics, objectives, and coalitions to combat racial and economic injustices. In the process, they both learned from and transcended the limitations, biases, paternalism, and leadership of old guard Black middle-class leadership, the union movement, and the American left.¹⁹

Generally, long civil rights movement scholarship depicts the Black freedom struggle as a singular, ongoing, constantly evolving social movement. Whether implicitly or explicitly, this approach implies that activism and activists—regardless of time or space—share a common history, lineage, tradition of resistance and resilience, and political trajectory and have far more in common with one another than previously assumed. Some scholars deploy this approach as part of a larger political project designed to radicalize and invigorate civil rights activism—both past and present—by reconnecting it to the Black radical tradition. Others have done so as a means to deemphasize Black identity politics by stressing the influence of the left on interracial organizing and mass-based politics, while others have used the long movement in a way that often blurs the distinctions between North and South, Civil Rights and Black Power, and nonviolence and self-defense as they challenge these long-standing dichotomies. Whether intentionally or not, these works refute the declensionist narrative frequently associated with Black Power and the mid- to late 1960s in a way that de-racializes the movement to make it more palatable, approachable, and usable for those interested in multiracial social justice organizing today.²⁰

One major contribution of this trend has been a proliferation of studies on northern, urban freedom struggles. Previously, New York City was surprisingly understudied, likely because of Black New York’s complexity as well as the city’s size and distinctiveness. Recently, though, a number of excellent works discussing a wide range of subjects and/or areas within the city have been published, including important studies of grassroots activism and community organizing in Harlem during the 1910s and 1920s; the local civil rights movement, Black radicalism, Black nationalism, and interracial progressivism during and after World War II; Black and Puerto Rican conflict and cooperation; Black social and cultural history in the Bronx before the 1970s; desegregation and civil rights struggles in Brooklyn; and Black student activism and Black Power in Harlem in the late 1960s.²¹ Moreover, unlike in studies of other cities, scholars have paid particular attention to struggles for racial justice within New York’s municipal sector and public employee unions, including transit, education, and the police department.²² There is even a book on the century-long struggle for racial equality in the FDNY written by journalist Ginger Adams Otis, Firefight.²³

Despite the increased interest in New York City’s freedom struggles and Black freedom studies generally, most scholars have omitted fire departments and Black firefighters from Black freedom studies. While fire departments might seem peripheral to this history, the absence of efforts to secure jobs and racial equity within urban fire departments is particularly ironic if one considers that some of most iconic images associated with the civil rights and Black Power movements involve tensions between predominantly white firefighters, fire departments, and Black citizens and communities. The Birmingham fire department turned its hoses on Black schoolchildren in response to the 1963 Children’s Crusade, and white firefighters came under attack for being regarded as a hostile, externally controlled, occupying force that had more regard for property than Black people during the urban rebellions in the mid- to late 1960s. In each instance, access to firefighting positions had been a key component of local movement demands, a detail that is frequently left out of more politically oriented histories, which tend to separate and remove economic justice and Black labor struggles from the real movement.²⁴

Black Firefighters and the FDNY helps fill this existing void as it engages with and makes critical interventions in social movement, African American studies, public policy, and racial formation and ideology scholarship, as well as African American, labor, urban, and legal history. I center the book on a segment of African American civil service workers—Black firefighters—to interrogate the nuances and complexities of and the interplay between their struggles and local and national freedom movements. I pay close attention to temporal shifts and variations and ideological and tactical shifts, breaks, and ambiguities associated with particular moments and movements in history and contextualize how different generations of Black firefighters in New York shaped—and were shaped by—the temporal, spatial, political, economic, and racial contexts they encountered.²⁵

Black Firefighters and the FDNY builds upon the work of a number of talented historians who have studied the working-class base of Black freedom movements, Black workplace and labor-oriented struggles, and corresponding Black working-class efforts to influence and reform policy as well as labor and urban politics. My work expands on these themes but does so while also examining how the ideology, rhetoric, and politics of community control and Black Power influenced, and were incorporated and modified by, New York’s Black firefighters and the Vulcan Society. This society played a seminal role in the formation of the Association of Black Professional Firefighters, a national Black firefighters’ organization that fought to reestablish residency requirements and increase minority representation and has pushed for affirmative action from below in fire departments and cities across the country since its founding in 1970.

Most labor-oriented jobs and justice and Black Power studies scholars have neglected the impact and influence of the Black Power movement on Black working-class politics, activism, and subsequent social justice unionism. Labor historians concerned with struggles for jobs and justice and civil rights unionism during this period have focused almost exclusively on Black workers in interracial industrial unions and the decline of organized labor since the 1970s.²⁶ While several books discuss Black working-class labor activism and agency during the 1960s and 1970s more broadly, most directly link civil rights activism and civil rights unionism to the rise of employment discrimination litigation cases and affirmative action during the 1970s. These works rightly emphasize the centrality of Black workers and Black labor struggles to the civil rights movement but mistakenly suggest that civil rights unionism, civil rights protests, and the passage of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act led to the subsequent and inevitable rise of affirmative action from below during the late 1960s and 1970s, and they either fail or refuse to acknowledge that the Black Power movement existed or depict it as a relatively minor and ineffectual blip in the history of Black workers or Black labor.²⁷ Other scholars—most notably Judith Stein—directly address Black Power but, in doing so, effectively blame Black workers for injecting identity politics into the class struggle by bringing their false consciousness to American labor and working-class politics and weakening the perceived unity of the American working class. Stein, however, fails to acknowledge that whiteness and racism were defining features of a white working class that has adhered to and continues to cling to white identity politics to perpetuate and maintain the psychological and economic wages of whiteness.²⁸

Conversely, Black Power studies have rarely considered Black Power labor struggles and organizing, and when they do, such considerations are largely relegated to discussions of the Revolutionary Union movement and/or the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit.²⁹ Thankfully, a growing number of scholars—building upon the work of Frances Fox Piven, Herbert Hill, Philip Foner, William Gould, and others during the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s—have begun to reassess the Black Power movement’s labor politics and its relationship to, and influence upon, social justice unionism and Black working-class politics and activism both during and after the Black Power movement. My work contributes to and expands upon this growing body of innovative scholarship.³⁰

Black public sector workers have also been similarly slighted in most labor and Black Power studies scholarship.³¹ This void is puzzling, considering that scholars in each field often have an expressed interested in studying and finding a usable past. At the end of World War II there were 5.5 million public employees in the United States, a figure that rose quickly to 11.6 million by 1967. The number of unionized public employees exploded during this period, rising from 400,000 in 1955 to 4 million by the mid-1970s. While unionism on the whole increased yearly into the mid-1970s, public employee unions accounted for most of this growth during both the 1960s and 1970s, as well as in the years since. At the same time, private sector unionism rapidly declined. By 1993, only 10 percent of all private sector workers were unionized, a figure that dropped to 6.9 percent by 2011.³²

Public employees constituted a minuscule proportion of the membership of the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) at the time of the 1955 merger but accounted for over 20 percent of its membership nearly forty years later. By 2011, 37 percent of all public sector workers were unionized, including a disproportionate number of Black workers, who were overrepresented in public employment as well as the labor movement. Government, historian Thomas Sugrue noted, became one of the most important avenues for minority opportunity,³³ and since the 1970s, Black workers have relied on increased access to the public sector as their primary pathway to white-collar jobs, middle-class wages, and good benefits. Black workers—and Black women workers in particular—still remain overrepresented in the public sector but have inordinately borne the brunt of austerity measures; shrinking municipal, state, and federal budgets; and neoliberalism, which have gutted municipal workforces and fostered a series of layoffs, downsizing, privatizations, and wage and benefit clawbacks that began in the mid-1970s. Current attacks on the public sector are thus a direct assault on the gains secured by the civil rights and Black Power movements and the demographic, spatial, and political transformation of American cities since the 1960s.³⁴ By expanding the timeframe to the present day, Black Firefighters and the FDNY is able to historicize and contextualize the experiences of Black firefighters and Black public sector workers; the social movements they engaged in; and their continued legacy, significance, and importance to and within Black freedom movements, as well as the various forms of resistance, countermovements, and racist ideologies, policies, and practices they have encountered and continue to encounter.

In fact, no job better exemplifies the long, protracted, and staunchly resisted struggle for racial equity and justice in the public sector than firefighting, and nowhere was this struggle longer or more difficult than in the FDNY. Black Firefighters and the FDNY chronicles the intersections and connectivity between Black freedom struggles, labor activism, and Black public sector workers over more than a century by focusing on the crown jewel of the municipal sector—firefighting—in the nation’s premier urban metropolis, New York City.

Unlike previous studies of Black workers in industrial labor, Black Firefighters and the FDNY addresses issues that remain highly contested and relevant today. Unlike industrial jobs, which dried up long ago, firefighting is one of few high-paying, high-status, and highly coveted jobs still available to working-class people with limited educational backgrounds and no prior experience. As I show, Black activists and firefighters in New York persistently fought for greater access, representation, and racial equity in the FDNY before, during, and after the modern civil rights movement and continue to do so today. While fire departments have always had a symbolic and tangible value to the Black freedom struggle, they were also a site of racial and gender exclusion, contestation, and whitelash and have remained a focal point and an important battleground for those seeking to overturn affirmative action and reverse the expansion of racial justice and Black democratic rights that had been established by the Black freedom struggle.

Black freedom and labor struggles became more litigious and bureaucratic during the 1970s and 1980s. Black Firefighters and the FDNY buttresses this point and examines this history by charting the highly uneven evolution and application of affirmative action and employment discrimination litigation by comparing and contrasting the trajectory of legal struggles against racial and gender discrimination in the FDNY since the 1970s with similar cases elsewhere. While employment discrimination litigation during the 1970s and 1980s isn’t a particularly heroic or celebrated aspect of the Black freedom struggle, historicizing this period contextualizes the Vulcan Society’s recent legal victory and can help inform contemporary debates about and struggles against racism; sexism; attacks on affirmative action, voting rights, and civil rights; and the persistence and expansion of both overt and structural racism in post, postracial America.

This book explores how Black New Yorkers, Black firefighters, and the Vulcan Society built, sustained, and advanced the struggle for racial representation, equal opportunity, and racial equity in the FDNY for more than a century despite facing staunch massive resistance from whites within and outside the fire department who fought to protect their jobs. Ironically, the identity and outlook of many white firefighters are rooted in both the denial of whiteness and a shared possessive investment in whiteness as their property right. Racism and racial exclusion were a common feature of urban fire departments for most of the twentieth century, but New York and the FDNY were the epicenter of struggles to combat and dismantle overt, institutional, and structural racism as well as white countermovements seeking to protect and defend white hegemony and white men’s jobs from racial minorities, women, and the expansion of racial justice and democratic rights occurring elsewhere. Why were white firefighters in a traditionally liberal city like New York able to ward off political and legal challenges to departmental discrimination for so long while other cities and fire departments could not? Why did the FDNY go from being one of the more racially inclusive departments in the nation to the least so quickly? How did the Vulcan Society—which profoundly affected and influenced Black politics, Black public sector workers in New York, Black firefighters nationally, and the application of affirmative action to fire department discrimination cases—sustain itself, evolve, and adjust over the years despite encountering relentless opposition and whitelash at every level of the FDNY and municipal and federal government for decades? How and why did the Vulcan Society secure support from the Justice Department and the federal court system during George W. Bush’s administration after it had been forced to endure over four decades of discrimination and racism before it was able to receive a modicum of racial justice through the legal system? Finally, how does the long struggle for racial justice in the FDNY fit into the larger historical patterns of race and racism in America, and how did that struggle intersect with Black resistance to racial injustice in the United States as well as the ebbs and flows of Black freedom movements over time and space?

The book’s first chapter explores the origins of the FDNY’s insular and protectionist work culture and the heavily racial, ethnic nationalist, and gendered craft-union-like identity that developed among volunteer firefighters during the nineteenth century, traditions that were carried over and adapted after the department became professionalized in 1865. Focused on the deep-rooted history of racial and ethnic exclusion as well as how Irish Americans eventually seized control of the department, Chapter 1 argues that Irish Catholic New Yorkers used the fire department as a vehicle to assert their manhood, citizenship, and whiteness while also solidifying their collective social, civic, political, and economic standing and power via municipal politics and municipal employment. Irish Americans, in staking their claim within modern, urban America, found common ground with other whites even as they advanced their collective white ethnic nationalist interests. They did so, in part, by actively endorsing and vigilantly enforcing white supremacy, racism, and racial exclusion and discrimination within the FDNY while also permitting small groups of other white ethnics to become members of the brotherhood.

Chapter 2 chronicles efforts to secure Black access to nonmenial municipal jobs, including firefighting, within this extremely racist period as Black political brokers worked both within and in opposition to Tammany Hall to secure a share of high-status patronage positions. In particular, it explores the virulent racism and segregation that New York’s pioneer Black firefighters—a very small number of isolated Black firefighters appointed to the FDNY between 1898 and the mid-1930s—faced in their firehouses and in the department. I examine the social and political contexts and conditions that led to each man’s hiring, but I pay particular attention to the experiences and career of legendary Black firefighter—and subsequent founder of the Vulcan Society—Wesley Williams. Williams, I argue, was deeply influenced by the New Negro movement and working-class racial militancy, and he viewed his pioneering role in the FDNY as an opportunity to uplift the race and further the struggle for racial equality by serving as a symbol of righteous Black masculinity, citizenship, individual achievement, and race pride by assertively and publicly disproving notions of racial inferiority while confronting racism within the FDNY head-on.

Chapter 3 begins by examining the fall of Tammany Hall and Irish American political hegemony during the early 1930s as well as the corresponding rise of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, a Republican, New Deal liberal who came to power during the Great Depression after galvanizing a multiethnic, interracial coalition. La Guardia eliminated Tammany’s control over the FDNY by reforming and strengthening New York City’s civil service system and procedures. At the same time, Black labor and civil rights activists and proponents began asserting their own power, using boycotts, protests, direct action, and political pressure to demand Black access to unions and previously all-white jobs within the Black community, the municipal sector, the private sector, and wartime industry. While peripheral to this broader movement, New York’s struggles for economic and racial equity in the 1930s also included calls to increase Black representation in both the police and fire departments, and following La Guardia’s reforms, a small but unprecedented number of highly qualified Black New Yorkers secured highly competitive firefighting jobs in the FDNY. This infinitesimal influx of Blacks into the department sparked a wave of racism in individual firehouses and in the upper echelons the FDNY, which began seeking ways to formally segregate and separate Black firefighters.

The Black men who joined the FDNY during the 1930s and early 1940s demanded to be recognized and respected as equals, refused to be intimidated by the department’s large white majority, and were committed to combating any semblance of second-class citizenship, segregation, or racial discrimination. With guidance from Wesley Williams (who had risen to the rank of battalion chief) New York’s Black firefighters formed the nation’s first Black firefighters’ organization, the Vulcan Society, which worked in coalition with New York’s popular front as it agitated and organized to achieve a Double Victory. This coalition included white ethnic allies within the department, civic and civil rights groups and leaders, Black workers and labor leaders, influential Black politicians, the Black and progressive press, and antiracist Communist councilmen in New York’s city council. Collectively, these groups prevented the formal segregation of the department, eliminated overtly racist departmentwide polices, and established strong antidiscrimination rules and regulations within the FDNY.

Chapter 4 focuses on the postwar period and the experiences and battles waged by the Vulcan Society’s second generation, which built upon the gains secured by the group during World War II to expand the size and influence of the group, both within the FDNY and in the Black community. While postwar Black firefighters continued to be subjected to firehouse segregation and constant racial slights, this generation of Black firefighters was composed largely of returning military veterans who were imbued with militancy, race pride, and fighting spirit. The Vulcan Society, during most of the postwar period, was led by Wesley Williams’s political protégé, Robert O. Lowery. Lowery, with the help and commitment of this new generation of Black firefighters, greatly expanded the group’s power and prestige, but he did so within the context and politics of the Cold War. Relying upon highly sophisticated leadership and the skills and commitment of its membership, the Vulcan Society effectively maneuvered within the structures of municipal politics, public employment, and the FDNY and exerted a degree of power and influence in each that far exceeded the organization’s numerical strength. In many ways, the postwar Vulcan Society was a prototypical example of civil rights unionism, as the organization made no distinction between Black civil and civil rights struggles and the fight for racial equality and justice in its firehouses, the FDNY, and New York’s municipal sector as a whole. The society became firmly entrenched within the public, civic, and political life of Black New York and drew upon and leveraged these connections and coalitions as it fought to expand Black access and opportunity. The Vulcan Society not only played the game, but it had done so far more effectively and efficiently than its white ethnic peers and competitors. It emphasized strengthening Black influence and power within the Robert F. Wagner administration and the Democratic Party so it could place Black faces in high places, who would then institute racial reforms. This strategy worked to a degree, but not as hoped. In 1963, for example, the Vulcan Society galvanized public support for Robert Lowery’s appointment to the FDNY’s three-man