The Mayor’s Office in the City of St. Louis has seized a U.S. Supreme Court ruling regarding race and firefighter promotions in another city to renew its battle against former Fire Chief Sherman George in the local media.
George’s suit against Slay and the City for racial discrimination and illegal job action is pending, but Slay’s chief of staff Jeff Rainford is arguing the mayor’s case in the friendly venue of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
On Tuesday the Post reported that Rainford thinks the new U.S. Supreme Court ruling regarding white firefighters in New Haven, Conn. justifies how Slay handled promotions in the St. Louis Fire Department.
Both Slay and Rainford are members of the daily paper’s Community Advisory Board – as was Police Chief Joe Mokwa. Fire Chief Sherman George was never invited to serve on this board.
“The fact: the situation of that case is very different from our case,” George said in a statement he also sent to the Post.
The New Haven case, Frank Ricci, et al. v. John DeStefano, et al., involves a group of white firefighters who alleged racial discrimination when the City threw out the results of a promotions test because they would have disproportionately promoted white firefighters.
Though the promotions list over which George lost his job disproportionately promoted white firefighters by an exponential margin, that was never the basis of his documented objections to the test or the list.
“First, we are not challenging the racial bias in the case. We are challenging the overall testing competency of the test that was given,” George said in his statement.
”Second, we are in direct appeal from the Civil Service Commission, which has nothing to do with the test, but has to do with the illegal conduct of the mayor and his director of Public Safety.”
Slay and his then Director of Public Safety Sam Simon pressured George to make a contested set of promotions. The promotions list was based upon a test administered by a testing firm (EB Jacobs) that George had specifically urged the previous Public Safety director not to hire.
George’s authority as fire chief to promote – or not promote – was provided by the City Charter and had been upheld by Judge Lawrence G. Crahan in a 2005 appellate court ruling. When George refused to make the promotions based on a list that resulted from what he judged to be an inadequate test, he was demoted (by Charles Bryson, who had been appointed as Public Safety director after Simon’s abrupt resignation).
George then resigned and filed suit, claiming that his charter-established authority had been illegally violated.
“If the mayor could have promoted them, he would have done it. But he didn’t because he couldn’t,” George told The American.
“If the director of Public Safety or the mayor could have done it without my authority, it would have been easy. But they couldn’t. Only the fire chief could. To make it legal, they had to get rid of me.”
As George’s lawyer, Tom Blumenthal, has repeatedly pointed out, it was Slay and not George who raised the issue of race in the context of the test and promotions list. George’s objection – as the City’s subject matter expert – was that the test did not adequately test for the necessary fire scene knowledge.
It is the Slay administration’s focus on race – which continues in Rainford’s response to the New Haven ruling – that forms the basis of George’s racial discrimination suit.
’Obvious bias’
Though George does not see the ruling on the New Haven case as a precedent for his suit against Slay and the City, as an expert in the fire service he does have an opinion about it.
“Concerning the New Haven case, we understand that the record in the Connecticut case was perhaps not as developed as it should have been to show what was obvious bias in favor for the white firefighters,” he said in his statement.
The International Association of Black Professional Firefighters saw the ruling as a setback, but said that time is on their side.
“We know this ruling will not end the quest for redefining Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” said Joseph B. Muhammad, IABPFF president.
Title VII protects individuals against employment discrimination on the bases of race and color, as well as national origin, sex and religion.
“As Americans revisit disparate impact, we still contend diversity is a matter of national security and is a compelling state interest in our profession,” Muhammad said.
The lawyers who lost in the Supreme Court ruling are anything but daunted. Interestingly, like Rainford they claimed the ruling brought clarification regarding how to proceed.
”We believe this decision reinforces the ability of minorities to challenge questionable and discriminatory promotional examinations,” said Dennis R. Thompson and Christy B. Bishop of Thompson & Bishop, in a statement.
“It only affects the City of New Haven by defining and heightening the standard by which a City must adhere in order to voluntarily comply with Title VII in the face of exams that appear to have a discriminatory impact. It must also be borne in mind that the disparate impact standard should apply equally to all members of every race, gender or national origin.”