Williams was born in 1897 and joined the FDNY in 1919, at a time when the department was functionally segregated — not by formal policy, but by the systematic exclusion of Black applicants from assignments and promotions that had characterized the department’s earlier decades. He served for many years as one of the few Black firefighters in the department, and his promotion to Lieutenant in 1927 at Engine 55 was a milestone in the department’s racial history.
The context for Williams’s service and promotion was the broader history of racism in American municipal institutions, which operated through both formal exclusion and informal harassment. Williams documented the conditions he faced in his memoir and through his later advocacy. He helped found the Vulcan Society in 1940 — named for the Roman god of the forge and of fire — which has served since its founding as the professional organization of Black FDNY members, advocating for equal opportunity in hiring, promotion, and assignment. The Vulcan Society has been a persistent presence in the department’s history, filing civil rights complaints and lawsuits to challenge discriminatory practices across decades.
The fact that Engine 55 is where Wesley Williams made that milestone is part of the company’s institutional history — known within the department and relevant to understanding the company as an institution with a specific place in a long story. Buscemi was at Engine 55 in 1980, more than fifty years after Williams’s promotion, in a department that had evolved considerably in its racial composition and formal policies, though not without continuing challenges and controversies. The history of the firehouse that he joined was not only the history of the neighborhood it served, but also the history of an institution working through its own internal contradictions.