Durham’s First Black Firefighters

This content first appeared in a Facebook posting on December 13, 2019.

Durham Herald Company Newspaper Photograph Collection, North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Here’s a bit of hidden history of the Durham Fire Department. Below is a photo the Bull City’s first black firefighters. They were hired in October 1958 to staff a new Station 4 on Fayetteville Street that served the preserved predominately black Hayti neighborhoods.

But as the subsequent clipping from 1949 notes, found last week, the City of Durham consider adding black firefighters nine years earlier. It details a special meeting between DFD, the City Council Safety Committee, and the Durham Committee on Negro Affairs. As expected, there were objections. [Then what happened? Good question. Future research topic.]

Two years later, the first modern-era black career firefighters were hired in Winston-Salem, with eight reporting for duty at Station 4 on Dunleith Avenue. They operated as an integrated fire company but with segregated living quarters. They became an all-black fire company by 1957, and the entire department integrated by 1967.

Greensboro hired its first black firefighters in 1958, for a new Station 4 and they staffed an engine company and newly activated ladder company. Raleigh hired its first black firefighters in 1963 and 1964, and six of the station staffed Engine 2 with an integrated crew and segregated living quarters.

However, the budget document for the 1952-53 fiscal year contained a note from Raleigh Fire Chief Alvin Lloyd, that they were considering “the setting up of a Negro Company.” But he couldn’t find a way “in this budget to make the changeover at this time.” Chief Lloyd died in office in 1955, and his successor, Jack Keeter, took the reins.

Legeros Fire Blog

Durham’s First Black Firefighters

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