In 1919, when Wesley Williams became a New York City firefighter, he stepped into a world that was 100 white and predominantly Irish. As far as this city knew, black men in the Fire Department of New York FDNY tended horses.Nearly a century later, many things in the FDNY had changed--but not the scarcity of blacks. New York had about 300 black firefighters--roughly 3 percent of the 11,000 New York firefighters in a city of two million African Americans. That made the FDNY a true aberration compared to all the other uniformed departments, like the NYPD. Decades earlier, women and blacks had sued over its hiring practices and won. But the FDNY never took permanent steps to eradicate the inequities, which led to a courtroom show-down between New York Citys billionaire Mayor, Mike Bloomberg, and a determined group of black activist firefighters.
