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"MEN OF COLOUR": RACE, RIOTS, AND BLACK FIREFIGHTERS' STRUGGLE FOR EQUALITY FROM THE AFA TO THE VALIANTS
| By John C. McWilliams |
Pennsylvania State University, DuBois |
| Fire! Few exclamations instinctively instill an intense, visceral reaction that conjures up terrifying images of one's home engulfed in flames, families left homeless, or worse, the loss of life. Benjamin Franklin recognized this potential danger in 1735, when he declared fire "the fiercest enemy of property" in his Pennsylvania Gazette. Subsequent articles calling for the creation of a volunteer fire association resulted in the formation of the Union Fire Company, whose members were some of the most prominent men in Philadelphia, including signers of the Declaration of Independence. Since then, firefighters have been providing an often overlooked but invaluable public service, perpetuated partly by tradition, but mostly of necessity. What began as an early urban reform experiment rapidly evolved into an indispensable local "first responder" agency that has remained a basic institution for more than 250 years.1 |
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A fire company is a unique organization. A deeply rooted social function, fire fighting provides scholars with view of human interactions through the lens of the community. Influenced by changing technology, local politics, and fluctuating demographic patterns, the fire company serves as a cross-section of American society. Fire companies, like other institutions, were also shaped by social mores predicated on ethnicity, and, throughout most of its history, race, a salient factor in the recruitment, structure and evolution of fire fighting. |
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Perhaps even more explicitly than the civil rights movement, the fire company provides us with a valuable "bottom up" perspective on the imperfections of race relations over the past two centuries. Civil rights leaders were committed to achieving racial equality by securing the right to vote and equal access to housing, employment, and education, all essential "quality-of-life" opportunities, to be sure. But the firefighters' world—especially the non-white firefighters' world—was a different and more intense experience. They lived together, ate together, and, of course, fought fires together, where they depended on each other. Voting and integration were not irrelevant issues for these defenders of life and property, but they were secondary to their job performance, which was literally, always, a matter of life and death. |
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As an effort to achieve racial equality, the experience of black firefighters is, in a real sense, a history within a history. The emergence of volunteer fire companies and the attempts of black citizens either to establish their own fire company or to integrate the white companies functions as a microcosm of the city's—and the nation's—history that parallels the larger, protracted national struggle for racial equality.2 |
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More than a subordinate subplot to the civil rights movement, the black firefighters' struggle was a legitimate push for social recognition by disenfranchised, "ordinary" men who desired to assume a basic civic duty—to defend their homes and families. |
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