Two Kansas City firefighters — one Black and the other white — sat down in separate rooms to take a test, their answers recorded on video.

How they scored would determine their place on the next promotion list for potential fire captains.

The Black firefighter gave thoughtful, clear answers to questions about how he would address certain situations at fire scenes and how, back at the firehouse, he would handle personnel issues concerning his crew.

The white firefighter’s responses, by contrast, were cursory and vague. It was almost as if he weren’t taking the process seriously.

But when judging was over they both got the same low score.

“We were stunned ... I felt physically ill. It was that offensive,” said attorney Erin Vernon.

The videos of the 2012 test were shown in court five years later, after the Black firefighter filed a racial discrimination lawsuit. He was one of many Black firefighters who have been complaining for decades that promotions in the Kansas City Fire Department are biased in favor of white men.

During The Star’s year-long investigation of systemic racism in the KCFD, Black firefighters said they are cheated in the promotion tests, passed over in favor of white firefighters, and held back by the department’s “good ole boys” network.

Several lawsuits filed by Black firefighters challenging the fairness of the promotion system have cost taxpayers $1.5 million in jury awards, settlements and plaintiff’s legal fees over the past eight years. In total, the city has paid out more than $2.5 million over the last two decades to Black and women firefighters, who also accused the department of day-to-day hostility and harassment. Newer claims continue working through the legal system.

The fire department’s own employment records tell the story.

Of 196 fire captains on the department roster in July (all but one of them men), only 22 were Black: 11 percent in a city that is 30 percent Black.

They have even less representation at the upper ranks. The Star’s analysis shows the higher the pay and prestige, the less likely it is that a Black firefighter holds that position.

Out of the 48 highest-ranking members, only three were Black: two of the 28 battalion chiefs and one of the seven deputy chiefs.

Likewise, the department’s deputy director and both assistant chiefs are white. As is Donna Lake, the first female fire chief, and every fire chief since the department’s one and only Black fire chief retired more than 30 years ago.

The department also has nine division chiefs, who largely have administrative roles connected to the ambulance service. None is Black.

Never in the department’s history have there been more than three Black battalion chiefs serving at the same time Throughout the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s, all the deputy chiefs were white.

“The numbers don’t lie,” said Congressman Emanuel Cleaver, who for decades has been promoting greater diversity within the department, first as a civil rights leader, then city councilman and Kansas City’s first Black mayor.

City government’s attempts to make the department’s upper ranks more diverse were thwarted decades ago when lawsuits from white firefighters prompted City Hall to drop its affirmative action policies.

No labor contracts agreed to since that change have allowed for preferential promotions to address the racial imbalance among captains and battalion chiefs.

City Councilwoman Katheryn Shields said it is not an elected leader’s role to get involved in personnel matters. But the city’s in-house legal counsel told her and other council members during closed sessions in recent years that steps were being taken to address the issues provoking the discrimination suits.

“We were being told and assured that the fire department and (city’s legal department) were working together to address cultural bias issues,”she said.

It concerns her that Black firefighters are still under-represented in the department’s hierarchy.

“Here’s the deal,” she said. “We ought to be reflecting minimally the demographics of our city.”

‘Not fair to the community’

On a bleak Monday afternoon last fall, 20 current and retired firefighters — all but five of them Black — snapped salutes as a hearse passed by carrying Kansas City’s first and only Black fire chief.

When Edward Wilson Jr. joined the segregated Kansas City Fire Department straight out of high school in 1943, he started there at firehouse No. 11, 2033 Vine St., the only station where Black firefighters were allowed to work.

Wilson rose through the ranks when the department was integrated 15 years later and, in 1980, was appointed chief by a white city manager who, under pressure from Black civic leaders, was working to diversify the overwhelmingly white fire department.

To many, Wilson’s historic pick seemed to portend greater opportunities for future generations of Black firefighters.

“I thought when we hired a Black chief that would solve much of the problem because young African American men and women would see the chief and, you know, conclude that, ‘Okay, this is something for me,’” Cleaver said.

Retired firefighter Charles McRoy, who formed the first association for Black members of the department some 40 years ago, said he saw their fortunes improving in the 1980s.

But those advances hit a wall in the early ’90s when the city stopped a policy in which one out of every four people promoted to captain was supposed to be a woman or a member of a minority group.

In the early 2000s the department installed the current promotional system, which critics say continues to hold Black firefighters back because of its subjectivity and potential for bias.

“It’s pretty much gone back to the way it used to be,” McRoy said “It’s not fair to the members. It’s not fair to the community.”

In 2014, the department adopted a Strategic Plan that set as one of its high priority goals the development of “methods to facilitate diversity in supervisory and management ranks.”

But after the plan was adopted, only a minor reform was made in the promotion process, and department officials haven’t analyzed the data to see if that was effective, Lake’s principal assistant in charge of organizational development, deputy director Richard Gist, acknowledged in a recent interview.

Now, six years later, the plan’s diversity goals are far from being met.

In interviews with The Star’s reporters, Lake said she was looking at several ways to boost recruitment of Black firefighters and improve opportunities for their advancement into management roles.

“The more diverse we can become at the inflow, then the more opportunity we have to become more diverse at the upper levels,” she said.

Leaders of the two unions representing Kansas City firefighters said they agree.

“I’d like more people to get promoted, you know, of all shapes and sizes, because it just, you bring so much more to the table with different people, different opinions, different experience levels,” said Clay Calvin, president of the International Association of Fire Fighters Local 3808, which represents the department’s battalion and division chiefs.

But neither his local nor Local 42, which represents uniformed personnel at the ranks of captains and below, have labor agreements that allow for minority preference in promotions and haven’t for decades.

Last spring the city council paid a white battalion chief $400,000 to drop a lawsuit in which he claimed he’d been unfairly passed over for promotion to deputy chief due to his race.

Then-Fire Chief Gary Reese had chosen a Black battalion chief named James Dean for one of the few top jobs where a fire chief has discretion in making promotions. According to the lawsuit, Reese told battalion chief Kevin Hunt that he lost out because he was white.

“When you step into the shoes of an African American, I’ll apologize to you, because I know you’re preparing yourself, but as a decision there’s a contingency I’m looking out for,” Reese said, according to the suit. “And it’s not always who deserves the job and I apologize for that and will never argue that you would not do a better job.”

The suit said that was an admission of race discrimination, which is illegal under Missouri law.

Rather than fight the suit in court, the city settled for more than any Black firefighter has ever received for a discrimination claim.

Reese did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Hunt’s attorney declined comment.

‘Biased’ promotion system

For decades the captains promotion list has been a bottleneck for minorities who wanted to advance, The Star’s investigation found.

It’s not like working in a private company — your work history doesn’t factor in. A firefighter’s position on the list is determined overwhelmingly by an exam consisting of a written portion and two video recorded tests.

The testing process seems fair and objective on its face. But Black firefighters have complained for years and testified in court that the video portions of it are open to racial bias.

The test is cited by critics as an important factor in explaining why, out of the 192 firefighters promoted to captain since Jan. 1, 2005, only 25 were Black.

Nine were Hispanic, one was Native American, one Asian and four were white women. In one two-year promotion cycle, all 15 openings went to white men.

The grading is done by three-person panels who view the recordings and agree on a score. Through 2012, those panels were made up entirely of Kansas City firefighters with ranks of captain and above.

“I don’t even know a place where they let your coworkers grade you on whether or not you should get promoted,” said Aldon Myers, a former Black Kansas City firefighter who left the department to become a lawyer. “So imagine that in your workplace. Think about that. What it creates is a good ole boys club.”

Assessment panels aren’t supposed to take into consideration anything other than the answer the person taking the test gave on tape. But according to former Deputy Chief James Garrett, who is Black, panel members often ignored that rule and shared what they knew about the test taker.

Did his dad work on the department, too? What do his buddies say about him? In some cases, a panel member even helped the person they were grading study for the test, Garrett said in a sworn deposition, and had a personal interest in how they scored. The judges haggled to determine a final score.

“(T)hey would barter with others to make sure that person got a good score,” Garrett testified.

White, well-connected firefighters benefited most from that haggling, Garrett said.

To address that criticism, the department has since 2014 farmed out the job of grading the video-recorded answers to other fire departments, which are also overwhelmingly white nationwide. But the Kansas City Fire Department has done no analysis to determine if that has made a difference.

“I’d have to really sit down and look at that,” Gist said.

Garrett’s testimony came alongside the videos of tests introduced as evidence in court in 2017. They showed a Black firefighter performing far better than a white candidate who seemed to not even try, yet both were given the same score.

The Star reviewed the videos and, as Vernon said, it’s hard to see how Tarshish Jones and his white counterpart got the same grade for their presentations.

A recorded voice asks them how they would handle four scenarios. They are given four minutes to respond to three of them that The Star reviewed. They had longer to answer the fourth, which was too technical for a non-firefighter to assess.

On one of the questions, Jones takes the full four minutes to relay how he would, as a supervisor, handle a situation where a firefighter put himself and other firefighters in danger by going into a burning building alone without his radio.

The white man taking the test gives a less detailed answer in less than a minute.

His answers on two other questions also fell short in comparison. They were flip at times and less professional.

And yet the assessors gave them the identical score on that part of the test: 2.5 out of a possible 7.

Two retired battalion chiefs later reviewed the recordings on Jones’ behalf and determined that he should have gotten 5.4 points and the white firefighter deserved a 2.

While it wasn’t proven at trial that the underscoring was intentional, the evidence of bias was enough to convince a Jackson County jury that Jones had been wronged.

The city paid out more than $1.2 million in damages and legal fees.

Five other Black firefighters have sued or threatened to sue the department in the past several years, alleging that they were unfairly denied promotion or opportunities to improve their chances of being promoted.

The city paid $543,500 to resolve three of those cases. Another was dismissed because it was filed too late. Another case is pending trial.

Vernon represented Jones and one of the men who settled.

“They came to us because they tried over and over and over again to get promoted to captain and they couldn’t make it happen, while they watched their white colleagues get promoted the first or second time they were taking the test,” she said.

“They felt like unless they did something, nothing would change.”

Travis Yeargans suspects that, like Jones, he was among the Black Kansas City firefighters who received lower scores than they might otherwise have gotten due to his race.

The two retired fire captains who re-evaluated Jones’ test also reviewed Yeargans’ performance on video and agreed he was underscored.

In a lawsuit filed on his behalf in 2018, Yeargans’ lawyers said he should have been among the 17 firefighters promoted to captain off the 2012 promotion list before it expired at the end of 2014.

Instead, he was ranked much further down the list and decided to retire in March 2014 after 23 years on the job. He is now a full-time minister on Kansas City’s east side.

“I felt like I’d been cheated,” he told The Star. “One of the first things I thought was, ‘Man, I wonder if that happened to me the previous test, too.’”

Because he missed the deadline to file his lawsuit, Yeargans had to drop his case.

He’s not bitter, but feels he might have had a better shot at promotion had he not been treated like an outsider by his white colleagues. When Yeargans was preparing for the 2012 captain’s test, he learned about an all-white study group at another station, but he wasn’t invited to participate in the group whose members ended up doing quite well that year.

“I would have liked to have been involved in those things. But I wasn’t,” Yeargans said. “I asked the (battalion) chief about it and the chief told me, ‘So you’re a smart, articulate guy. You’ll do fine. You don’t need these study sessions.’

“That was his words to me.”

New union contract

This fall, the fire department is for the first time in two decades seeking proposals from outside consulting companies to see if there might be a better testing method for promoting firefighters to the rank of captain. That could improve diversity up the chain of command.

If a change occurs, it will only be with the approval of Local 42, which is now in the midst of contract negotiations with the city.

Gwen Grant, president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Kansas City, says that, if the fire department and union are serious about promoting more Black firefighters to positions of authority, they need to seize this opportunity and make radical changes.

“If you don’t support affirmative action, but you are in favor of fixing things, I want to know how you plan on fixing them then,” she said. “If you don’t like the terminology of affirmative action, then let’s talk about equity … if you support equity, then equity is not all things are equal.”

Even the consultant who 20 years ago developed the department’s promotion process has expressed concerns about the lack of progress in diversifying the management ranks.

Consultant David Morris has long advocated changes that might improve the chances for minorities to advance by taking into consideration their work records, which is common in the business world and in choosing deputy chiefs.

“I’ve tried everything I can to get him to do it,” Morris said in sworn testimony in the Jones case, referring to Paul Berardi, who was fire chief at the time.

Berardi testified that he was in favor of the idea, and Lake has said she is, too.

But fire chiefs don’t have the power to make those decisions on their own. That has to be done through the labor-management process in which Local 42 would have to agree to any changes in the captain’s test, and Local 3808 to any changes in the test that battalion chiefs take.

Neither union’s current or previous contracts have allowed for that kind of subjectivity in promotions.

Local 42 president Tim Dupin said in an interview that he supported hiring more Black and minority firefighters and having a fair promotional process.

No one has presented him with a proposed affirmative action plan in the nearly three years he’s headed his union. As new contract negotiations were about to begin this fall, Dupin declined to say whether he would support one in the abstract.

“I’m open to anything … to improve diversity and reduce discrimination on the department, but for me to just blindly comment on a catch phrase, basically, without a plan behind it, I’m not going to do that. It doesn’t make sense.”

Lake declined to say what her priorities are in negotiating a new contract.

“I’m not going to tell you my laundry list of things I would like to see change, “ she said. “But there are some tweaks and changes in that process that I would like to see.”

Read the other two parts of the series, examining racial and sexual harassment in the Kansas City Fire Department and segregation in fire stations across the city.

This story was originally published December 6, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Racism in the KCFD: Discrimination keeps Black firefighters from reaching top ranks."

Mike Hendricks

The Kansas City Star

816-234-4738

Mike Hendricks covered local government for The Kansas City Star until he retired in 2025. Previously he covered business, agriculture and was on the investigations team. For 14 years, he wrote a metro column three times a week. His many honors include two Gerald Loeb awards.