E-Mail This Article to a Friend BACKSLIDING Firefighters aren’t there yet BY DEIRDRE FULTON

In the two years since a federal appeals court ruled that the Boston Fire Department (BFD) had achieved racial balance and could lift its affirmative-action hiring policy, two all-white classes have graduated from the city’s Fire Academy.

Despite Boston’s majority-minority population, African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians make up only one-third of the department’s uniformed officers. Worse than that, minorities comprise only 10 percent of lieutenants, captains, and chiefs. If all-white classes continue graduating from the academy, there’s little chance those numbers will improve, especially in an institution that continues to embrace tradition fervently.

In the face of this news, the Boston Society of Vulcans, formed in 1969 to advocate for more minority representation in fire service, is not about to relax its vigilance.

"The all-white class sends a very strong message to the communities, and it’s insulting," says Karen Miller, president of the Vulcans. "The city should be embarrassed, especially after they’re telling everyone there’s no cronyism, no racism, no discrimination. This all-white class, it shows — it’s there."

Miller and her organization are requesting meetings with Mayor Thomas Menino, Fire Commissioner Paul Christian, and other interested parties, to revamp the fire department’s hiring and promotion process. The mayor’s office referred calls from the Phoenix to the BFD, whose spokesman says he is unaware of any recent correspondence raising concerns about Fire Academy graduates from the Vulcans.

"We have plenty of diversity," says BFD spokesman Scott Salman.

But statistics suggest otherwise. As of March 2, 2005, 33 percent of the 1450 uniformed firefighters in the department are minorities; of those, 384 are black, 105 are Hispanic, 16 are women, and one is Asian. White men dominate the leadership positions: all the deputy chiefs, along with 56 of 60 district chiefs, 75 of 79 captains, and 185 of 217 lieutenants are white, according to the BFD.

By comparison, 20 percent of the Boston Police Department’s higher-ranking positions (captains, lieutenants, lieutenant detectives, and sergeants) are filled by minorities, and 35 percent of the 2034-officer police force is African-American, Hispanic, or Asian. Hardly stellar, but still better than the fire department. And after a court ruling ended the BPD’s affirmative-action policy, Commissioner Kathleen O’Toole indicated a desire to develop recruitment and promotional processes that will help maintain and increase diversity.

So when will the BFD catch up? Perhaps when it sheds some of its old ways.

"Firefighting is a family tradition," says Stephanie Schorow, author of Boston on Fire: A History of Fires and Firefighting in Boston (Commonwealth Editions, 2003). "Many firefighters, their grandfathers, their fathers were firefighters, they want their sons to be firefighters."

While she doesn’t dispute that racial prejudices exist within the fire department, Schorow notes that these jobs are passed down from one generation to the next. Firefighting traditions within families run so deep, she says, that should minorities "somehow get into the ranks, they too will want to pass it on to their children."

On top of that, the fire department has a history of exclusivity that exceeds even that of the police force, which became institutionalized later in American history. Schorow points out that before minorities were kept at bay, Irish-Americans, who now tend to hold firefighting positions, had to knock down the BFD door, which at the time was guarded by "Yankees" of English descent. (Schorow cites one 1837 Yankee-Irish riot in Boston; most estimates say there were more than 10,000 people involved, and 700 of them were firefighters.)

Indeed, the fire department is "the last bastion of almost total segregation in most cities," says Gary Orfield, director of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University. Orfield’s biggest concern is that court rulings relaxing affirmative-action mandates (he adds the example of the Supreme Judicial Court’s recent ruling on school segregation in Massachusetts) are moving too fast and happening too early.

"We haven’t cured the problem," he says. "The problem is that we have conservative courts that are proclaiming victory when we’ve made little progress. And they’re taking away the tools we need to keep making progress."