Alan Legum Fights Discrimination In Police Department

The Baltimore Sun reports:

When Annapolis city leaders agreed to a federal consent decree in 1986 to more than double the number of black firefighters in the Fire Department within five years, they thought it would end a long-simmering court dispute over hiring.

But nearly two decades later, city officials are grappling with the contentious issue again.

City officials had promised a federal judge that they would try to boost the percentage of black firefighters to about 25 percent by 1991. But the share of black firefighters has dropped since 1986, from 12 percent to about 9 percent today.

The consent decree expired in 1999.

“We spent hours and hours working on that and I don’t think either party would have agreed to something that they didn’t think was fair,” said Alan Hilliard Legum, the lawyer who represented the black firefighters during the legal negotiations in 1986 but has not been involved in the issue since. “I don’t know where things fell through, but it’s a shame that they did.”

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