FDNY medal still named after racist

IT WAS the moan that stopped him.

Deep in an inferno that was eating up a Brooklyn house during one of the worst blazes in the city in 1968, FDNY Firefighter James Tempro thought he and his crew had safely evacuated all the occupants.

Knocking down flames where he could as the nozzleman of Engine 217, Tempro — who’d already been in the fire too long — was inching his way toward the apartment door in Bedford-Stuyvesant when the weak cry reached his ears.

“I realized someone was still in there,” Tempro told the Daily News. “I had to go back in.”

The rescue nearly cost Tempro his life. He was hospitalized for weeks with smoke inhalation and serious burns — but he saved the young boy found unconscious on the floor of the home at Dekalb and Lewis Aves.

The brave act also won Tempro what’s considered the FDNY’s top annual honor: The James Gordon Bennett Medal for the most outstanding act of heroism.

It was the first time a black firefighter took home the award.

Now, Tempro, 88 and retired, wants the name of the medal changed — because James Gordon Bennett wasn’t just a 19th-century publishing giant. He was a giant racist, too. “When I received the award in 1969, I had no idea of the history of Bennett, who he was or what he stood for,” Tempro told The News. “But now that I’ve learned more about his beliefs, that he was a racist who supported slavery, it demeans the medal for me a bit.

“I think it’s time for the Fire Department to change the name. There are so many others more deserving, people of high moral character that should be offered this honor,” he said, noting that stadiums, libraries, medical facilities and other longstanding institutions change names and endowments over time.

“For me, it’s like saying, here’s an award named for George Wallace” — the race-baiting 1960s Alabama governor.

When the FDNY first handed out the James Gordon Bennett award, in 1869, its namesake was among the nation’s richest and most powerful men.

Bennett and his son set up the FDNY medal with a $1,500 endowment. According to the endowment letter sent at the time, the award was to thank firefighters for extinguishing a fire in Bennett’s country house.

For several years, the Bennett medal was the sole citation for valor He’d pepper those editorials awarded by the FDNY. with ugly slurs about AfricanAmericans

Given Bennett’s immense stature, — and often expressed it carried tremendous prestige anti-Semitic feelings as well. — even though his connection “Bennett was a horrible racist, to the Fire Department was and he was very pro-slavery and slight. pro-South,” said Brian Gabrial, a

A self-made millionaire and journalism professor at Concordia titan of journalism, Bennett University in Canada who founded the New York Herald wrote about the Scottish immigrant and was famous as a publisher of in “The Press and the Slavery forceful, influential editorials in America, 1791-1859.” that clearly expressed his views Bennett’s views about race on the issues of the day. In the were hardly outrageous in his run-up to the Civil War, Bennett time, Gabrial noted. let loose with numerous tirades “Yes, he was a racist, but so against Abraham Lincoln and was just about every other white what he dubbed the President’s person at the time,” he cautioned. “n-----” war. “He was conservative, but mainstream. The fringe elements at that time would have been the abolitionists.”

But Bennett wasn’t just an everyday racist — by 1861, he had a massive platform that reached upwards of 84,000 readers every day.

“The whole history of negro insurrections proves that there is no race of men so brutal and bloody-minded as the negro . . . the negro, once roused to bloodshed and in possession of arms, is as uncontrollable and irrational as a wild beast . . . ” he wrote in his newspaper on Nov. 23, 1859, in response to abolitionist John Brown’s raid in Harper’s Ferry, Va., to initiate a revolt among enslaved people.

It was just one of many editorials in which he railed about the inferiority of black people and their inability to understand anything but “brute force.”

His words shaped public opinion and political policy — and the invective he hurled on the editorial page of the New York Herald is believed to have helped whip up the frenzy of the 1863 Draft Riots.

The violent uprising began as a protest against the Civil War draft — but it quickly devolved into an outright race riot, with whites attacking blacks during a week of bloody battles.

Along with targeting an orphanage for black children, the rioters vandalized the offices of the New York Tribune — a pro-abolitionist paper founded by editor Horace Greeley.

The mob also went for The New York Times, but the building was staunchly defended by its editor and an investor, who manned Gatling guns from inside and fired at will, said David Mindich, journalism chair at Temple University.

When Bennett died in 1872, he was called “the best journalist and worst editorialist of his day,” Mindich said.