BOSSIP Exclusive: New Book Traces 100-Year Fight To Integrate NYC Fire Department

“Firefight” Recounts African-American’s Struggle To Break The Color Barrier In New York City’s Fire Department

A new book chronicles African-American’s long battle to end a controversial hiring system that kept them virtually locked out of New York’s fire department for generations.

“Firefight” blends local history and legendary firefights to explain blacks’ struggle to integrate the insular department. The result is a quick-moving story that spans more than a century, and analyzes the fight to end the fire department’s use of an antiquated hiring system that helped keep blacks from joining the ranks.

“It challenges a lot of the entrenched narrative in New York City,” author Ginger Adams-Otis, a veteran reporter for the New York Daily News, told BOSSIP. “It challenges that the civil service system is colorblind.”

This mattered, Adams-Otis said, because tests like these created a fire department whose complexion did not reflect New York City’s demographics. Even today, the department is more than 90 percent white in a city that is 25.5 percent black.

The hiring tests also ultimately determined who got access to the best-paying civil service jobs.

The Vulcan Society, the city’s black firefighter organization, sued the FDNY in 2002, alleging its entrance exam was discriminatory. After a nine-year legal battle, a judge ruled that the fire department’s hiring exam was discriminatory. The city would later agreed to change the test, pay nearly $100 million in back wages and hire a diversity CEO.

“When we talk nationally about the disparity in uniformed agencies, there’s a real legacy and an inherent challenge to people of color in these hiring systems that we have a very hard time challenging,” Adams-Otis said. “We believe in meritocracy, and we believe the test is the best way to fill these jobs.”

“Firefight” also tells the story of Wesley Williams, Manhattan’s first black firefighter. When Williams joined a Little Italy firehouse in 1919, his fellow smoke eaters used outright racism and hostility in an attempt bully him out of the uniform. Williams stayed on, and later founded the Vulcan Society, the black firefighter’s group that would challenge the fire department’s hiring system.

“We are too comfortable writing about these struggles in the past,” Adams-Otis said. “I would be doing a disservice if I ignored how much his efforts were still being hammered out today by the next generation of black firefighters.”