After Bias Ruling, Firefighter Applicants Look BackBy
KAREEM FAHIM
Published: August 27, 2009
Dreaming of careers fighting fires, they applied by the hundreds, only to end up with test scores that put highly coveted jobs in the city’s Fire Department hopelessly out of reach. So they turned their attention to seeking — or settling for —other jobs: U.P.S. worker, credit union teller.
Josh Haner/The New York Times
Jamel Nicholson applied to the city's Fire Department, but after passing his exams he was put on a waiting list. He eventually became a train conductor for the Metropolitan Transit Authority.
Jamel Nicholson, who had a family to support, unclogged drains for a living before becoming a subway conductor. Staveus Daley took a job as a deckhand on the Staten Island Ferry.
Others joined the Police Department, but remain troubled by a bitter irony: They were deemed qualified to carry guns, but not to pull victims from burning buildings.
The men are among thousands of applicants who took the Fire Department’s entrance examinations in 1999 and 2002, tests that a federal judge recently found had discriminated against black and Hispanic applicants. Now, the parties to the lawsuit are hashing out how to redress past wrongs and diversify a department that is still overwhelmingly white, though city officials say minority outreach efforts and a new test introduced in 2007 are steps in the right direction.
In a recent court hearing, lawyers with the federal Department of Justice, who sued the city based on complaints made by a black firefighter’s association, the Vulcan Society, said that granting hearings for each applicant would be unwieldy. Instead, the parties foresee a broader remedy, including a combination of back pay, retroactive seniority and priority hiring.
In the thousands of stories the court will not hear, there are common threads. Some of the minority applicants, like Mr. Nicholson, who is black, decided to join the department after 9/11, looking for a decent job and a way to do good, even if a career in the Fire Department seemed exotic.
“Nobody in my neighborhood was a firefighter,” said Mr. Nicholson, who is from Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
In 2001, he was working at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center delivering boxes and supplies. He bought a study guide for the Fire Department examination at a Worth Street bookstore and took the test in 2002. He said he received a score of 74.12 percent — a low passing grade — and a year later, received an almost perfect score on the physical examination. But his place on the list of applicants — No. 7,221, he said — meant he might never be called.
“I left it alone,” he said. In the meantime, Mr. Nicholson, who has two children, scrambled to find another career. He took the exam to become a subway conductor in 2004 and trained to become a plumber. He worked for Roto-Rooter for a spell, and then, in 2008, the Metropolitan Transit Authority called him up to work on the trains.
He is 34 now, too old to take another Fire Department exam (candidates who wish to take the test cannot be older than 29).
“I still want to do it,” he said. “As a conductor, though, I help people at a different level.”
The scarcity of black firefighters persists more than a hundred years after the department hired its first African-American employee: William E. Nicholson, a 27-year old former cement tester, joined the Fire Department in 1898 and took care of the horses, said John L. Ruffins, a former Fire Department captain who has researched the history of the department.
From there, progress came at a crawl. In 1919, the first African-American in New York to actually fight fires, John Woodson, sent a letter of advice to the next black firefighter, Wesley A. Williams, who later rose to battalion chief.
“Do your work, and do it as near-perfect as you can,” Mr. Woodson advised. “Don’t force your friendship on anyone.”
Mr. Ruffins, who joined in 1952, was the only black firefighter in Engine 44, and one of the only firefighters — besides perhaps the Jewish ones — whom the captain would not invite to parties at his house. “I enjoyed my time in the department,” he said. “But I didn’t direct any of my children to it.”
In a profession handed down from fathers to sons, Mr. Ruffin’s reluctance might be as important as any other in explaining why the Fire Department remains resistant to change: At the end of May, 3 percent of the 11,529 firefighters were black and 6 percent were Hispanic — in a city where each group makes up about 27 percent of the population, according to federal census estimates.
Those who sought to break that cycle first had to navigate the Fire Department’s daunting admission process.
Like Jamel Nicholson, Mr. Daley, who is black, took the entrance examination in 2002. He, too, was inspired to join after 9/11, he said, when he and his fellow deckhands at NY Waterway got off their boats in Lower Manhattan and tried to help emergency workers.
He ran into a friend from high school, a trainee firefighter who had barely escaped from one of the falling buildings. “It was overwhelming,” Mr. Daley said. “I said, “That’s something I’d like to do.’ ”
He was 26, and he and a racially diverse group of friends who played football and basketball together studied for the exam.
He was aware of the department’s poor minority recruitment record, but said that he went “with an open mind.”
“If I’m good enough, I should be taken,” he said.
Mr. Daley, who had attended college for three years, did well, scoring more than 85 percent on the written exam and earning spot No. 5,795 on the firefighters list, he said.
As he waited for the department’s decision, he took a job as a deckhand with the Staten Island Ferry, and was later promoted to work for the head supervisor.
The signals were encouraging: Mr. Daley cleared his physical and a drug screening and was even fitted for a uniform.
“Right before the class was supposed to start, I asked them what time I was supposed to show up,” Mr. Daley said. “They told me the list for my test had expired, and said, ‘Good luck with your life.’ ”
Mr. Daley has stayed in shape, running every day, and held on to a dimming hope that he could still be a firefighter. When the news of the judge’s decision’s came last month, raising the possibility that he could join the department, he admitted that he was not sure what he would do. “I think I would have made an excellent firefighter,” he said.
“There’s a part of you that’s still interested,” he added, “and there’s a part of you that’s beaten down.”
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