Even with a recruitment push by Fire Department brass, the number of Black firefighters and paramedics has fallen to third behind Hispanics and whites of the same rank.
“I need diversity greatly in my entry ranks and up through,” Nance-Holt said during a budget hearing in October, according to Block Club Chicago. “Because the only way to get people to this position to walk in the door. If we can’t get them in the door, we can’t make them engineers, lieutenants, captains … on up the ranks.”
The result has been an industry where white men make up about 80% of U.S. career firefighters, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Curtis said fewer Black firefighters in the department equals a missing stable income in neighborhoods that desperately need them. “What does that equate to? Crime. Bottom line.”Carmelita Wiley-Earls has the deft touch of a velvet hammer, a mix that’s part grandmother, part drill sergeant. Her speaking voice is soft, but commanding, as one would expect of a woman who served as a deputy district chief, a fire marshal and the commander of the fire academy before her retirement last November.
460 graduates who earned a state paramedics license and are working for fire departments and ambulance companies. The graduates include 130 single mothers and 13 homeless people.“The Black Fire Brigade prepares students that have never been exposed to this type of opportunity — and I’m going to keep talking about that word, because that’s all it is. It’s an opportunity to make a difference,” she said.
“The best thing about this program is they’re around firefighter culture because we operate this like a fire department,” Curtis said. “They’re learning about a first responder family and how we stick together.” Chicago Fire Department Lt. Quention Curtis adjusts Mia Richardson's uniform at the Black Fire Brigade in the Washington Park neighborhood on April 7, 2022, in Chicago.
The lack of access to neighborhood firehouses also puts Black youth at a disadvantage, said Strong, the father of a CFD firefighter. During his career, McCann turned over an infamous video of a 1990 party at a Woodlawn firehouse that captured a group of white firefighters making ethnic slurs, drinking beer and exposing themselves. He later sued the city claiming his superiors retaliated for turning over the tape.
But the early heroism of the Black company didn’t lead to many more positions or spots in white firehouses. In cities such as Chicago, New York and Boston, Black progress on fire departments was often met with outright hostility, Wayne State University professor David Goldberg wrote in his book “Black Firefighters and the FDNY: The Struggle for Jobs, Justice and Equity in New York City,” which made comparisons among racially segregated departments.
Quinn’s 1979 Tribune obituary noted his reputation both as a straight talking “fireman’s fireman,” and a bigot. He once told reporters the reason why there were so few Black firefighters was because “They don’t like heat and smoke.” In another interview, Quinn said: “We have never had any discrimination in the Chicago Fire Department. It just seems that the Irish and the Polish are the people that try to be firemen.
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