Changing Sides

White rights in Birmingham

When blacks demanded civil rights in Birmingham during the early '60s, the Alabama city answered with police dogs and fire hoses. A decade later, blacks sued to integrate the same Birmingham police and fire departments that had forcibly put them down. After a drawn-out legal struggle, the city signed a consent decree in 1981, agreeing to hire minorities and women in about the same proportion as workers in the city's private sector: between 33% and 50% for blacks, and 15% and 30% for women. The U.S. Justice Department backed the lawsuit and helped draft the eventual agreement. At that time--four months after Reagan took office--a department official pronounced the consent decree to be "reasonable and lawful."

But now the Justice Department has joined a suit by a group of ten white policemen and firemen seeking to overturn the settlement. The plaintiffs claim they have been passed over so that less qualified blacks and women can fill numerical quotas. The city, they charge, has engaged in "illegal and unconstitutional discrimination against whites and males."

The Justice Department defends its intervention as consistent and evenhanded. "We always side with people who claim they have suffered discrimination on account of race," says Civil Rights Chief William Bradford Reynolds. Indeed, the Birmingham case is not the first time the department has sided with white employees attacking affirmative-action programs. It has joined "reverse discrimination" suits in Boston, New Orleans and Detroit as well. Hiring quotas are among several "race-conscious" remedies that the Reaganauts have tried to abandon. Others include mandatory school busing and denying tax exemptions to segregated schools. Last week, for instance, the department asked a federal court of appeals to throw out a Dade County, Fla., law setting aside construction contracts for minority contractors. But the Birmingham case differs in at least one important respect: back in 1981 the department had promised to defend the original settlement from legal attack.

The city will argue that the blacks promoted are no less qualified than the whites passed over. Although the whites do have higher test results, they benefit from a scoring system that awards some points purely for seniority. Until the 1970s, Birmingham had few black police officers and firemen.

"This isn't just a reversal," said Ralph Neas, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. "It's reneging." The original settlement, said Birmingham Mayor Richard Arrington, who helped negotiate it, "could have healed a 100-year-old wound. Now we will have to fight old battles"--in a federal courtroom, not in Birmingham's streets.