African Americans won an important Supreme Court
victory in late May. They have
been continuously fighting the racist hiring policies of the Chicago Fire
Department for nearly 15 years. In 1996, the city announced that it would only
hire those individuals to its fire department that had scored within the top
tenth percentile on the written examination that applicants are required to
take. Those who scored even slightly lower than a 90, though deemed “qualified”
by the City of Chicago to be a firefighter, were told outright that their
chances of getting hired were “unlikely.”
The following year, six African Americans who
tested within the qualified range filed a charge of discrimination against the
City of Chicago with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The
workers were issued the right to sue and then immediately took civil action
against the city. The suit was filed on the basis that the hiring practices of
the Chicago Fire Department violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
which prohibits the discrimination of workers by employers on the basis of
race, gender or religious beliefs.
The city responded by stating that the racist
policy was simply a “business necessity.” However, the practice would cause the
makeup of the newly hired fire fighters to be 76 percent white and only 11 percent African American, which is certainly not
representative of the population of Chicago.
The District Court
initially ruled for the workers, but then the Seventh Circuit Court overturned
the decision, claiming that the lawsuit was filed more than 300 days after the
policy went into effect and was too late. The case was taken all the way to the
Supreme Court.
Then, on May 24, 2010, the
Supreme Court unanimously overturned the previous ruling on Lewis v. Chicago, ruling that
the suit had indeed been filed on time. The case was then sent back down to the
Seventh Circuit Court to proceed as scheduled.
This recent Supreme Court ruling may
find itself coming into conflict with another of the court’s rulings from last
year. In the case of Riccio v. DeStefano, the court sided with a group
of white men who accused the city of New Haven, Conn., of discrimination. The
New Haven Fire Department had begun a policy of opening the doors to
historically oppressed workers into a traditionally all-white profession by
consciously hiring more African Americans to its ranks.
The racist ruling of Riccio v.
DeStefano threatens the ability of cities all over the United States to
fight systematic racist and sexist discrimination by employers. Lawsuits like
this are nothing more than attempts to turn back the clock and sustain the
apartheid walls that surround fire departments all over the country.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of
1964 was intended to rectify the brutal crimes against African Americans
through the racist Jim Crow segregationist practices that kept the employment
at workplaces throughout the entire United States reserved, for the most part,
exclusively for white men.
The fact that fire stations in the
United States have moved forward at all in terms of integration is due to Black
firefighters having struggled against the system of white supremacy that
divides and poisons the minds of workers and keeps Blacks, Latinos, women and
the LGBT community politically and economically subservient to global capital.
Any future victories will only be possible through continued struggle against
the enemies of the working class.
Workers and oppressed people have won legal battles
all over the country—from New York City to Boston, Los Angeles, Atlanta, San
Francisco and Chicago—to end the bigoted policies of fire departments and
patronage systems of favoritism and back-slapping. Affirmative action victories
in courts are a reflection of the strong anti-racist fights led by African
Americans, Latinos and women. It will take the building of a revolutionary
socialist party through a mass struggle to bring about the ultimate change
needed to create a society in which exploitation is plucked out at its roots.
Through struggle comes progress and through unity comes victory.
