In 1974, the city of Shreveport, Louisiana, hired its first African American firefighters. The three hires were in response to a lawsuit against the city and followed over 100 years in which the city’s fire department had not hired a single African American. This brief flurry of hiring African Americans quickly subsided and the city was sued again in 1977, this time by the U.S. Department of Justice. By the time that a consent decree was put in place in 1980, 10 out of 270 firefighters were African Americans—in a city where African Americans constituted approximately 40 percent of the general population.

The city admitted to having had systematically excluded African Americans from its fire department. The consent decree established a long-term goal of having the same proportion of African Americans (and women) in the department as in the relevant labor market. To move the department toward this goal, an interim hiring goal was also set. It called for filling at least 50 percent of all firefighter vacancies with African Americans, subject to the availability of qualified candidates. The city adopted a hiring process in which candidates who achieved passing scores on the civil service exam were placed on separate lists according to race and sex. The highest scorers were selected from each list, ensuring that 50 percent of the males selected to proceed to the second phase of the hiring process were African Americans. A group of white males who were denied employment in 2000 and 2002 sued the city, challenging its hiring practices and the consent decree. What should the court decide? Why?