| Fire! Few exclamations instinctively instill an intense, visceral reaction that conjures up terrifying images of one's home engulfed in flames, families left homeless, or worse, the loss of life. Benjamin Franklin recognized this potential danger in 1735, when he declared fire "the fiercest enemy of property" in his Pennsylvania Gazette. Subsequent articles calling for the creation of a volunteer fire association resulted in the formation of the Union Fire Company, whose members were some of the most prominent men in Philadelphia, including signers of the Declaration of Independence. Since then, firefighters have been providing an often overlooked but invaluable public service, perpetuated partly by tradition, but mostly of necessity. What began as an early urban reform experiment rapidly evolved into an indispensable local "first responder" agency that has remained a basic institution for more than 250 years.1 | 1 |
| A fire company is a unique organization. A deeply rooted social function, fire fighting provides scholars with view of human interactions through the lens of the community. Influenced by changing technology, local politics, and fluctuating demographic patterns, the fire company serves as a cross-section of American society. Fire companies, like other institutions, were also shaped by social mores predicated on ethnicity, and, throughout most of its history, race, a salient factor in the recruitment, structure and evolution of fire fighting. | 2 |
| Perhaps even more explicitly than the civil rights movement, the fire company provides us with a valuable "bottom up" perspective on the imperfections of race relations over the past two centuries. Civil rights leaders were committed to achieving racial equality by securing the right to vote and equal access to housing, employment, and education, all essential "quality-of-life" opportunities, to be sure. But the firefighters' world—especially the non-white firefighters' world—was a different and more intense experience. They lived together, ate together, and, of course, fought fires together, where they depended on each other. Voting and integration were not irrelevant issues for these defenders of life and property, but they were secondary to their job performance, which was literally, always, a matter of life and death. | 3 |
| As an effort to achieve racial equality, the experience of black firefighters is, in a real sense, a history within a history. The emergence of volunteer fire companies and the attempts of black citizens either to establish their own fire company or to integrate the white companies functions as a microcosm of the city's—and the nation's—history that parallels the larger, protracted national struggle for racial equality.2 | 4 |
| More than a subordinate subplot to the civil rights movement, the black firefighters' struggle was a legitimate push for social recognition by disenfranchised, "ordinary" men who desired to assume a basic civic duty—to defend their homes and families. | 5 |
| The high esteem fire companies enjoyed in Franklin's day—perhaps similar to that of citizen soldiers—diminished as volunteer firemen who previously met in public halls began to convene in engine houses where they competed primarily with the neighborhood pubs for new recruits. Rivalries developed among the newer companies so fierce that fighting—even when they responded to an alarm—was a common, if not expected occurrence. By the 1820s, and continuing through the 1830s, the ranks of the fire companies had begun to change. An influx of immigrants and free blacks engendered a heightened sense of nativism among residents encouraged a stronger sense of ethnic identity. Because there was also more frequent violent behavior resulting from recruiting members of street gangs, fewer citizen firefighters came from the middle class. Fighting fires had become an established homogeneous, white-dominated institution. | 6 |
| Philadelphia's rich colonial and revolutionary heritage and the city's experiences with nativism and racism in the antebellum period are well documented. Less known, however, in scholarly examinations of antebellum Philadelphia is the struggle of several black citizens to provide their own fire protection during one of the more violent and nativistic eras in the city's history. Fire companies are noted in several of the early histories of Philadelphia and in more recent studies, but the focus is on white firefighters. Consequently, the black firefighters' "challenge from below" has been largely neglected. Establishing a black, autonomous fire company challenged long-standing attitudes about race that resulted in dramatic social and political repercussions. | 7 |
| The attempt to compete with white fire companies in antebellum Philadelphia and later to join the city's paid fire department suggests much about the white power structure in Philadelphia and civic integration from the early 1800s through the twentieth century. If it is true that a society represents the cumulative experiences of its history, the experience of Philadelphia's black firefighters merits scholarly examination because it is a notable if obscure episode reflecting cultural influences and the social dynamics of race relations in private behavior, spacial isolation, and institutional practices in a city that simultaneously earned renown as a stop on the underground railroad as it has become synonymous with Americans' most cherished ideals of freedom, liberty, and equality. | 8 |
| Pennsylvania may have been a tolerant, pluralistic society offering ethnic and religious diversity, but it did not extend the same rights to its black citizens, who were concentrated in Philadelphia. In 1725 the General Assembly passed legislation stipulating that "If any free negroe, fit to work shall neglect so to do and loiter and misspend his or her time ... any two Magistrates are impowered and required to bind out to service, such negroe, from year to year." According to Gary B. Nash, the racial animus that characterized antebellum Philadelphia was fueled by a "Negrophobia preached from the middle and the top." The abolitionists' influence in the city notwithstanding, no publisher in Philadelphia was willing to put his imprimatur on the controversial Uncle Tom's Cabin, and one foreign traveler observed that "Colorphobia is more rampant here than in the pro-slavery, negro-hating city of New York."3 | 9 |
| In reality, firefighting in Philadelphia was a whites-only world. Even after the city hired its first black fireman in 1886, the department remained virtually segregated through more than half the twentieth century. The Jacksonian notion in the antebellum period of the common man participating in the democratic process largely excluded black Americans. |
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