When the Fire Department sought to commemorate Black History Month this year, a worthy honoree seemed obvious: Robert O. Lowery, New York City’s first Black fire commissioner, who was appointed nearly six decades ago by Mayor John V. Lindsay.
A documentary on Mr. Lowery’s life was to premiere Tuesday as the focal point of the department’s celebration of Black History Month, which ends this week. But the event was abruptly canceled after Mr. Lowery’s family protested the film’s failure to more fully include the Vulcan Society, the influential Black firefighters’ association.
“My father would not have been fire commissioner without the Vulcan Society,” said Gertrude Erwin, Mr. Lowery’s daughter.
The cancellation of the screening of “The First: Fire Commissioner Robert O. Lowery’s Story,” represents an awkward turn of events for an agency that is still struggling to overcome decades of racism and homogeneity in its ranks. All but one of its 23 staff chiefs are white men, while about 10 percent of firefighters are Black in a city whose population is about 23 percent Black.
The department first approached Mr. Lowery’s daughters about making the documentary roughly two decades after his death, at a ceremony last year renaming its auditorium in his memory.
The family was receptive, provided the department met certain conditions.
“We made very clear from the outset that the Vulcan Society was a core element in telling my uncle’s story and that it was an expectation that the Vulcan Society would have some role in the film,” said Chris Lowery, the fire commissioner’s nephew.
While the film does discuss the historical role of the 84-year-old organization, its lack of focus on the group’s current efforts falsely suggests the issue of racism at the Fire Department is a relic of the past, rather than a continuing concern, Chris Lowery said.
“You got to close the loop,” he said. “How do you talk about the past without acknowledging that the present is still open — that the past isn’t resolved yet?”
The department, which conceived and produced the documentary, defended its work and said in a statement that it was committed to releasing the documentary “to ensure the film is available for all to see.”
“Since its inception, we have worked with the Lowery family and tried to honor their wishes and tell an amazing story about Commissioner Lowery,” the statement said. “It was a well-intentioned project from the beginning, and one that, until recently, was meant to be shown to a small audience before being released via stream.”
Last year, the department’s Black History Month commemoration also revolved around Mr. Lowery, with the department’s current commissioner, Laura Kavanagh, presiding over the auditorium renaming. Ms. Kavanagh was chosen by Mayor Eric Adams in 2022 to become the first woman to lead the department.
The tension surrounding the documentary may be somewhat sensitive for Mr. Adams, the city’s second Black mayor, who once headed a fraternal group representing Black police officers.
The Vulcan Society has been instrumental in efforts to force the city to hire more Black and Latino firefighters, including filing a lawsuit that led the city in 2014 to agree to pay nearly $100 million to New Yorkers who wanted to join the department, but were stymied by systemic bias.
The Fire Department has continued to have internal strife under Ms. Kavanagh, some of it detailed in a lawsuit filed by four of her top chiefs that suggested that her leadership left the department with “an unimaginable level of unpreparedness.”
Robert Lowery, who died in 2001 at the age of 85, had a storied career that included stints as a firefighter, fire marshal and at least two terms as president of the Vulcan Society.
Regina Wilson, the society’s current president, said that the department reached out to her last year asking if she would be involved in the documentary, and she agreed.
Then, earlier this month, she learned through unofficial channels about an upcoming viewing of the film. An invitation came three days later, on Feb. 15.
Five more days passed until the department invited her to sit for an interview, ostensibly for a revision of the documentary, Ms. Wilson said. She declined.
“You can’t just record us and throw us in the back of the film, as though this organization is an afterthought,” Ms. Wilson said.
Later that week, the department alerted Ms. Wilson that the viewing had been canceled and would be rescheduled.
The family and the Vulcan Society have suggested that the department do a more thorough retake, and schedule the viewing for Mr. Lowery’s birthday, on April 20.
Mr. Lowery was appointed by Mayor Lindsay in 1966, becoming the first Black fire commissioner of a major U.S. city and serving for nearly seven years during a period when arson-fueled blazes raged through the city’s nonwhite neighborhoods.
Toward the end of his life, he turned to writing. In one essay, written in 1988, he said that the department was still “light years away from achieving” racial equity.
“It is obvious that the more that things change, the more they remain the same,” he wrote.
