Soul Patrol

The kitchen, the bunk room, the rig

The Content Campus's FDNY portraits, read against a century in which Black firefighters in New York were shut out of the firehouse table and bunk room.

Words: Onome T · Photographs: The Content Campus

One frame in Soul Patrol is a kitchen. It belongs to Engine 234 in Brooklyn, and it is where the firefighters of that house share their meals. Look at it twice. In 1919, a firehouse kitchen in New York was one of the places where a Black firefighter was told he did not belong.

Soul Patrol is a portrait series of FDNY firefighters by The Content Campus. Its intro calls the name a nod to the first firefighter unit. The firefighters stand in full turnout gear beside their engines on the streets of New York: Engine 9, Engine 748, Engine 123, Engine 234 on St. Johns in Brooklyn. Those are the portraits. The history underneath them is about the rooms and the rigs themselves. For decades the bunk room, the table and the assignment were contested ground for Black firefighters, and knowing that changes how an ordinary firehouse frame reads.

The record starts small. In December 1898 William Nicholson became the department's first Black member, according to the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. His job was the horses. Headquarters sent orders ahead of his first day detailing him to the Veterinary Department in Manhattan, the Amsterdam News reports, and he worked 14 years as a horse groom. The Memorial says another 16 years passed before a second Black firefighter joined.

In 1914, John H. Woodson was appointed to Hook and Ladder 106. He later wrote to a 20-year-old named Wesley Williams to warn him about the prejudice inside the department.

Williams went in anyway. In 1919 he took the firefighters' physical exam and was the only man out of 2,700 to score 100 percent, per the Amsterdam News. On Jan. 10, 1919, he reported for duty at Engine 55, 363 Broome St. in Little Italy, according to an excerpt from Ginger Adams Otis's book Firefight published by the Daily News. Headquarters answered the transfer requests with an order: "the Negro stays, and so does everyone else." Then it froze all transfers out of Engine 55 for a year.

Inside, the house set its own terms. The men told Williams he could eat with them only if he carried his bunk downstairs and slept in the basement. They shut him out of the kitchen where they ate their communal meals. Whatever plates, cups or cutlery he touched, they swept into the trash. A bunk room, a table, a set of dishes. The ordinary furniture of a firehouse, turned into a line.

It was never one house. Black firefighters were assigned to Black or commercial areas and kept out of fireboat and rescue companies, the Amsterdam News reports, and in one firehouse they were not allowed to eat at the same table as their white co-workers. Williams kept climbing. In 1938 he was promoted to battalion chief, then the highest-ranking Black firefighter in the nation. In 1940 he and more than 50 other Black firefighters founded the Vulcan Society because of discrimination in the FDNY.

Their mission statement began with the neighborhoods: "To reduce the loss of life and property due to fire, especially in Negro communities where fire losses are particularly high," as quoted in the Gotham Center's review of David Goldberg's book. The same review credits the society with helping make the FDNY the most integrated department in the nation in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1966 Mayor John V. Lindsay swore in Robert O. Lowery, a former Vulcan Society president, as the 21st fire commissioner, the first Black fire commissioner of a major U.S. city, according to the 9/11 Memorial & Museum.

Then the count. By the turn of the 21st century, Black firefighters were slightly under three percent of the FDNY, the Gotham Center review notes. In 2012 Judge Nicholas Garaufis ruled that the department had "knowingly and intentionally implemented and maintained racially discriminatory hiring processes throughout its history." Twelve Black firefighters died on 9/11; the 9/11 Memorial & Museum lists them by name.

That is the ground these portraits stand on. One frame shows two firefighters together at Engine 234 on St. Johns in Brooklyn, described in the gallery as two Black FDNY firefighters. Another shows a group of Black firefighters in front of Engine 123. The pictures make no speech. They are people, a rig and a firehouse address. Set beside Engine 55 in 1919, where one man was told to take his bunk to the basement, that plainness is the argument.

The series keeps going back inside the house, and that is where it earns its name. A firefighter gears up alone in the quiet of the firehouse. Another plays chess there. Boots and an axe sit by Engine 119; a breathing apparatus, jacket and boots lie out on the pavement, the working kit before anyone steps into it. A firefighter holds his young son in front of the truck. A firefighter from Engine 234 kneels to connect with a small child. Women did not join the FDNY until 1980, the 9/11 Memorial notes, and in this series a woman firefighter stands on a Brooklyn street in turnout gear.

Wesley Williams was told he could eat with the crew only if he slept in the basement. In Soul Patrol, the kitchen at Engine 234 is where the firefighters share their meals.