Word: birmingham
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...Birmingham, Alabama police and fire departments didn't look like the rest of Birmingham. While the city was 54 percent Black, and, presumably, about 50 percent female, its police and firefighting forces were almost monolithically white and male. The city was taken to task by the Justice Department for a pervasive "pattern and practice" of discrimination against Blacks and women. The court-ordered affirmative action plan, which became law in 1981, called for numerical goals to ensure the hiring and promotion of qualified individuals from the disadvantaged groups...
...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...
...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...
...fall." But five relatively hale U.S.F.L. locales-Tampa Bay, Michigan, New Jersey, Denver and Philadelphia-are also N.F.L. territories. Three of the largest U.S.F.L. markets-Chicago, Washington and Los Angeles-have been flops. While a 62,300 house was counted the first week of this season in Birmingham, the Stallions might not wish to try Alabama and Auburn head on. Anyway, who would televise the games? Awaiting baseball and good weather, the U.S.F.L. has been achieving unspectacular rating shares, while ticket sales are down...