BRONZEVILLE — Local alderpeople and firefighter organizations formed a Black Fire Coalition Friday to demand the city implement policies to rectify discriminatory practices that have kept Black people from joining and getting promoted within the Chicago Fire Department.
It was a crowded house at the Parkway Ballroom, 4455 S. King Dr., as alderpeople, led by Ald. Jeanette Taylor (20th), joined dozens of firefighters to announce the coalition and its new effort, Up In Flames.
After decades of discriminatory and racist practices, the Black Fire Coalition is calling for equitable hiring practices, the reinstatement of an affirmative action officer and the creation of a mayoral-appointed community advisory board to remedy problems within the city’s fire department.
Ald. Lamont Robinson (4th), who also serves as the vice chair of the city’s committee on police and fire, will announce a resolution at City Hall May 2 supporting the Black Fire Coalition’s demands, he said.
Firefighters celebrated the 150th anniversary of the nation’s first paid Black firehouse in 2022, Robinson said.
Nearly two centuries later, “we are still trying to figure out why we don’t have equity and justice in the fire department,” Robinson said.
“As the alderman of the 4th Ward, I commit with my colleagues standing with me today that we’re going to finally do right and make sure justice is served in the Chicago Fire Department for our Black brothers and sisters in the department,” Robinson said.
Taylor began talking with Black firefighters about their experiences with the city’s fire department in 2019 — the year she was elected, she said. What she heard was “heartbreaking,” she said.
In 2022, an Illinois federal judge abolished the Albrecht decree despite pushback and pleas from firefighters. The decree, signed in March 1980, mandated minority hiring within the fire department. Appendix G of the decree required the department to have 45 percent of all ranks identify as minorities.
At the time, the judge claimed “minority representation in each promotional rank of the city of Chicago Fire Department has increased substantially,” according to the Tribune.
The department had 603 Black people in all sworn ranks in 1980 when the Albrecht decree was implemented, Taylor said. In 2022, that number had barely budged at 602.
Of the department’s nearly 5,000 firefighters, medical responders and support staff, 63.2 percent are white, and over 90 percent are men, according to city data.
The Black Fire Coalition is demanding the city reinstate the Albrecht decree and Appendix G, Taylor said.
Then there are the lawsuits and allegations of racism, sexism and sexual harassment.
A 2017 investigation by the Better Government Association found the city paid $92 million in racial and gender discrimination lawsuits against the department between 2008 and 2017.
In 2021, the city paid $1.83 million to female paramedics who accused department leaders of protecting serial sexual abusers. That same year, the city inspector general found the department’s rules “insufficient” to prevent discrimination.
A 1998 lawsuit filed by thousands of Black prospective firefighters alleged department officials excluded minority candidates who had passed a 1995 exam but weren’t hired. Following a Supreme Court ruling, a federal court ordered the city in 2011 to pay $30 million to those denied jobs and hire the 111 Black firefighters who’d passed the exam nearly two decades earlier and pay their pensions.
Out of the 111 firefighters, 80 have since been forced to retire before seeing a promotion, said Chiquita Hall-Jackson, an attorney representing the “Lewis 111.”
The department forces firefighters to retire at 62, and there’s a requirement for the number of years before you’re eligible for a promotion, said Hall-Jackson. Many of the firefighters who took the 1995 exam were in their 40s by the time they were hired following the federal court order, limiting their advancement, Hall-Jackson said.
“You would rather throw money at a situation instead of creating real change to make sure folks that look like us actually are able to be middle-class folks,” Taylor said. “You put every obstacle in the way to not allow us, to make sure that we aren’t able to get in these spaces.”
When people say diversity is low because Black people don’t want to be firefighters, “we have proven that to be a lie,” said Lt. Quention Curtis, a 35-year veteran of the Fire Department.
Curtis founded the Black Fire Brigade in 2018 and has long fought to diversify the fire department’s ranks. His nonprofit has introduced over 750 people ages 18-30 to emergency services and fire safety careers.
The Black Fire Brigade celebrated a win this month after closing on the decommissioned Washington Park firehouse and museum at 5349 S. Wabash Ave., Curtis said. With the help of Ald. Pat Dowell (3rd), the group now owns the building where it hosts its programs, Curtis said.
But there is still more work to be done for current and aspiring members of the department, Curtis.
“It’s imperative that the communities are invested in,” Curtis said. “My hope for the future is that we get the consent decree back, Appendix G is enforced and it’s not all just words.”
James Winbush, a founding member of the African-American Firefighters and Paramedics League of Chicago, was one of the last Black firefighters hired under segregation in 1960, he said.
Winbush helped draft Appendix G in 1980 during the city’s first firefighter strike, he said.
The former fire captain has spent “60 years on this case,” advocating for nondiscriminatory practices in the department, he said. He is thankful to see a new generation pick up the baton and attack the problem politically.
“I’m so glad that you have taken up this fight,” Winbush said. “I’m peacock proud to see all of y’all.”
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