Firefight: The Century-Long Battle to Integrate New York's Bravest

This program is read by an AI-based synthesized voice.

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 A...