Federal Judge Cites Discrimination By New York Fire Department

John Coombs, the president of the Vulcan Society, won a racial bias suit against the New York City Fire Department. The Vulcan Society, Inc. is a national organization which aims to recruit and support African-American firefighters.

A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that New York City intentionally discriminated against black applicants to the Fire Department by continuing to use an exam that it had been told put them at a disadvantage.

“From 1999 to 2007, the New York City Fire Department used written examinations with discriminatory effects and little relationship to the job of a firefighter… [that] unfairly excluded hundreds of qualified people of color from the opportunity to serve as New York City firefighters,” said Judge Garaufis in the Memorandum and Order. “Today, the court holds that New York City’s reliance on these examinations constitutes employment discrimination in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

Is this surprising to anyone? The federal, states, and local governments in this country are a major employer of the American people. At the same time, many of these various government branches employ a much lower percentage of African American and Latino employees than the the percentage of residents living in their city or state.

For example, black and Latino firefighters comprised only 3 percent and 7 percentof the New york Fire Department as of 2007, respectively. Meanwhile, New York City's black and Latino population was more than 50 percent during the same year.

This matters because it is all about jobs in America. Jobs is the true civil rights issue. This is the perfect example of the kind of job in America that does not require much education and allows a person to enjoy the American Dream - house with backyard and white picket fence, good health insurance and retirement benefits, a good salary to pay for a family's monthly lifestyle, money to assist a child with paying for college, vacations to new places annually, etc.

The court found that the city closed the door on over a thousand qualified candidates of color,” said CCR attorney Darius Charney". Imagine a thousand more black and Latino men possibly married with good career jobs and supporting their families and by extension the communities in which they live. Imagine hundreds of guys simply leading productive lives in their community and adding value to America as citizens in particular.

Unfortunately, this kind of employment discrimination is more common than Americans want to believe even though it is illegal in this country. In 2005, it was reported that Baltimore hired its first all-white class of firefighter recruits in 50years. 100 percent of the recruits were white in a city where whites were only about 30 percent of the population and blacks made up more than 60 percent during 2005. In Montgomery County Maryland, the class of white recruits was 89 percentwhile their population in the county is only 60 percent.

One day, someone with deep pockets and a lot of power (President Obama possibly) will fund a study to determine the number of Latinos and African Americans that are actually employed in public local, state, and federal government jobs compared to their overall numbers in a particular city and state.