By The Editors

Diversity and equal opportunity in the Chicago Fire Department appears to have a high-level champion—the prospective new Fire Commissioner.

Robert Hoff, Chicago Mayor Richard TK Daley’s new appointee for the post, told a Chicago City Council committee Monday that he would welcome into the department black applicants who had not been hired 15 years ago because of the city’s discriminatory use of the firefighter’s examination results.

Pending word from the city’s law office, Hoff, a third-generation firefighter, said he’s ready to invite that group of black applicants, believed to number about 120, to the department’s fire academy. “The Fire Department is ready to put these people in school … We’re gonna go as a candidate class. It’s gonna be positive,” he said according to a report in the Chicago Sun Times.

Some of those applicants might now be in their late 40s, but Hoff, who is 54, said for a firefighter, it’s not age but physical condition that counts.

He also pledged to work to reduce the “real or perceived” anti-black and anti-Latino attitudes problems that many have charged have been rife in the department throughout its history. “If there are issues like that,” he said, [we’ll] nip it in the bud.

Hoff is widely expected to be confirmed by the City Council this week. His appointment, made necessary when the previous commissioner resigned recently over allegations of sexual harassment, came a month after the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Chicago was responsible for each time it used a hiring practice that arbitrarily blocked qualified black applicants from being offered a place in the departmental candidate class. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational and Educational Fund, Inc. was a co-counsel in the case, and

LDF President and Director-Counsel John Payton argued the case before the Court.