D avid G oldberg . Black Firefighters and the FDNY

From the nineteenth century until 2016, black firefighters working in New York City waged an ongoing struggle to overcome collaborative efforts against them by municipal government and the Fire Department of New York (FDNY), along with white firefighters and their unions. It was not until the latter year, according to David Goldberg in Black Firefighters and the FDNY, that the number of blacks in the department finally “rose to around 9 percent” (322). Goldberg provides a relentless display of facts, figures, and insights in narrating this black labor resistance to intransigent white supremacy. He does so with an able collection of archival evidence, oral histories, and a survey of secondary literature, all told as a gripping story that includes some memorable individuals and concludes with a qualified upbeat ending—at least for now. The chief architect of that multi-pronged, pan-generational campaign for equality is a seemingly ageless black firefighter advocacy group known as the Vulcan Society. Like the NAACP, the Vulcan Society has for the past century combined lobbying, legal action, and grassroots struggle, and endured its share of triumphs, setbacks, and internecine battles. “Black firefighters’ long struggle for racial equity and justice in the FDNY shaped—and was shaped by—the evolution and shifting contours of as well as the tensions, linkages, and ruptures between Black social movements over time and space,” Goldberg writes in the introduction (10). He critiques a tendency among labor and Black Power studies scholars to “mistakenly suggest that civil rights unionism, civil rights protests, and the passage of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act led to the subsequent and inevitable rise of ‘affirmative action from below’ during the late 1960s and 1970s” (14). Too often, he says, they miss important Black Power–influenced rank-and-file labor upsurges, particularly in the growing public sector, to which African Americans were increasingly flocking, drawn by the prospects of a career with job security and a living wage. “Unlike previous studies,” Goldberg argues, his book “addresses issues that remain highly contested and relevant today . . . Black activists and firefighters in New York persistently fought for greater access, representation, and racial equity in the FDNY before, during, and after ‘the modern civil rights movement’ and continue to do so today” (16). That fight in turn affected the way whites “interpreted, redefined, and attempted to frame and narrow the scope and content of racism” (10)

Affirmative action · Black Power · Civil rights · Economic Justice · Equity (law · Grassroots · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · White (mutation · White supremacy · American History and Culture · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Public Administration · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies