By Mara H. Gottfried
The St. Paul Pioneer Press
ST. PAUL, Minn. — Sixteen African-American former St. Paul firefighters will be honored tonight in an event the organizer hopes will be about “healing old wounds and moving on from the past.”
The retirement party and awards ceremony will honor most of the black members of the St. Paul Fire Department who retired or left under honorable conditions in the past 20 years or so and are still alive, said Gerone Hamilton, a St. Paul fire equipment operator and president of Fire Fighters United, which is hosting the event.
Fire Fighters United, the St. Paul chapter of the International Association of Black Professional Fire Fighters, decided to hold the event because the former firefighters “were never really recognized for their service” and the organization wanted to thank them, Hamilton said.
“Our success is on their shoulders,” he said. “We couldn’t be who we are as African-Americans if they hadn’t gone before us.”
Many of the people being honored tonight were involved in racial discrimination lawsuits filed against the city in 1972 and the 1990s, Hamilton said.
Seven black men sued the department in 1972, claiming “it failed to take affirmative steps to assure equal job access to blacks and other minorities,” wrote James Griffin in his book “Blacks in the St. Paul Police and Fire Departments.” A judge found the St. Paul firefighter exam discriminated against minorities and ordered the test restructured.
James Fowler Jr. was part of that lawsuit and one of a group of African-American firefighters hired in 1975. Fowler, who retired as a captain in 2000, said he’s honored to be one of the trailblazers recognized in today’s ceremony.
“There is nothing as great as being honored by your peers, the people walking in your shoes after you,” Fowler said. “It gives you a sense of worth. Hopefully, we made it a lot easier for them so they don’t have to go through some of the things we went through.”
When Toni Terry was hired in 1995, she became the 13th female firefighter in the department’s history and the first African-American one. There have been no female African-American firefighters since her. Terry retired in 2007.
Terry said that many of the other honorees were her mentors but that others in the department also encouraged her. “It wasn’t just African-Americans, it was all kinds of people,” she said.
The ceremony comes on the heels of another “epic event,” Fowler said. Last Friday, the fire department’s new headquarters was dedicated as the William and Alfred Godette Memorial Building. William Godette became the city’s first black firefighter in 1885. His brother, Alfred Godette, was also a firefighter and died in the line of duty in 1921.
Hamilton said he believes the city and the fire department “are really heading in the right direction now. I think a lot of the bad attitudes or bad vibes are gone. Times are changing and people are changing.”
Fire Fighters United plans to make the awards ceremony an annual event and not limited to honoring black firefighters, Hamilton said.
The organization invited people in the community and everyone in the fire department to tonight’s event, but it isn’t open to the general public, Hamilton said.
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