COULD COLORED MEN PUT OUT FIRES? (1898)
******************************************************************************************************************************** Brownstone Detectives investigates the history of our clients’ homes. The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations. Do you know the history of YOUR house? ******************************************************************************************************************************** In 1898, a Brooklyn – and New York City – “first” occurred when Fire Commissioner John Jay Scannell assigned the first black man to serve in the Fire Department in Brooklyn. William H. Nicholson, of No. 200 Myrtle Avenue, was a 29-year-old former cement tester who had been born in Virginia. He would become, in a number of ways, the precursor to the many first blacks to be “allowed” to integrate society’s historically “white” institutions in the century to follow. While, in 1891, Wiley G. Overton, another “colored man,” had been the first to be appointed as a patrolman on the Brooklyn police force, Nicholson, as a fireman, was still entering into a conflagration of his own. Patrolman Overton had found his existence on the force to be terminally difficult. Assigned to patrol the Brooklyn “colored district,” he had been transferred around to several precincts because no white officer would sleep in the same dormitory with him. His very presence in every station house had “caused trouble.” Finally, after being subjected to all sorts of “annoyances,” Overton had been “practically hounded from the force” a few years after his appointment. And it was likely that Nicholson knew this. Now, Nicholson had become the Fire Department’s unofficial test case for “colored integration.” […]
