Notes from the NAACP website:

On February 27, 2006, the National NAACP and the Reading Branch NAACP joined an employment lawsuit against the City of Reading, Pennsylvania. The suit charges the Reading Fire Department with implementing discriminatory recruitment and hiring practices against African Americans and other minorities. Although the City of Reading was 11% African-American and 37% Hispanic, the Fire Department was virtually all-white. Of the Fire Department's 147 full-time, uniformed employees, there were no African-Americans and fewer than five Hispanics.

The complaint alleged that the City's discriminatory employment practices include: refusing to recruit and hire African Americans and other minorities for firefighter positions on the same basis as whites; basing such recruitment on a primarily "word of mouth" system that results in the employment of friends and relatives of current City firefighters, the vast majority of whom are white; failing or refusing to adopt nondiscriminatory recruitment, application, testing, and selection techniques for the position of firefighter; and failing or refusing to take appropriate action to correct the effects of its past discriminatory policies and practices.

Plaintiffs in the case sought relief in the form of: a permanent injunction barring the City from discriminating against African American and other minority firefighter candidates on the basis of race and/or national origin; a permanent injunction directing the City to adopt and implement a vigorous recruitment program designed to attract qualified African American and other minority applicants for employment in numbers which at least reflect the proportion of minority applicants and candidates in and around the City; lost income and benefits; reasonable attorneys' fees and expert fees.

On March 27, 2007, the parties entered into a settlement which was approved by the court as a consent decree. Under the terms of the consent decree, the defendants agreed to encourage minority applicants into the firefighter program. The docket has no entries after the consent decree, and we have no further information in this case.

Kristen Sagar - 04/09/2009


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