GREENSBORO, N.C. — In honor of Black History Month, we are looking back to September 1961. At that time, the Greensboro Fire Department hired the first class of Black firefighters.
Twenty-eight joined the department and five are still alive today.
Ernest McCoy was one of them and he shared his story with us. He said he experienced isolation as the station was segregated.
"This took place and many many of us looked at what would it be like to be a fireman. I never saw black firemen as a matter of coming together, becoming a group becoming more caring for each other. Looking at the process feeling somewhat isolated because it was a black fire station," McCoy explained.
He said firefighting united everyone. McCoy said when they arrived on the scene, no matter who they were — everyone helped each other put out the flames.
"The color of the fire — it didn't make any difference. People were behind you when you went," McCoy said as he started to become emotional. "To fight the fire with the hose. Whoever had the hose you believe you had two or three people behind you sometimes but after that, they would get on their truck and get on our truck and that'd be it," McCoy said.
Although the station was segregated at the time, it's these experiences that are burned in McCoy's memory.
Many of those firefighters also became mentors later on.
"Station four was my first assignment station in 1987. I got a chance to meet the members of the first class really when I started working at station 11," Greensboro Deputy Fire Chief, Brent Gerald said. "They were trained by themselves. They had their training officers and they were put into the station after a few months of training. So they didn't have the benefit of someone mentoring them. Whatever they learned in training and whatever they did on their own to make to do the job well that's what they did."
"They mentored me and encouraged me to always do my best," Gerald continued.
Through this history, there was change.
But for both Gerald and McCoy, it can't stop here.
"I'm the third African American to be a Deputy Fire Chief. Flowers did go on to be the Fire Chief Hunter was the second one. But it saddens me a little bit that I'm able to count every person that I know personally, that the history doesn't go back far enough to have a long line of people," Chief Gerald continued to explain.
"It's not something that has stopped. It has gotten somewhat less or has gone underground," McCoy added. "We are all human beings with different pigmentation contingent upon the earth and because you are less dark or you more whatever, doesn't make you better than it just makes you different. And we are all different and we all have similarities. I think people tend to forget that."