When four high-level positions in the city administration became vacant last year, City Manager Robert W. Healy named new managers to head the departments--public works, water, traffic and parking, and community development. All four were white.

The appointments caused an uproar among minority residents, who say the hiring process for Cambridge's city officials fails to reflect the makeup of the city's population.

"They find a few candidates, they put them into the pool, but they never get to the mountaintop," says State Rep. Alvin E. Thompson (D-Cambridge), president of the Cambridge chapter of the National Association of Colored People (NAACP).

With tensions rising over the lack of minority hires, members of the Cambridge chapter of the NAACP stormed a City Council meeting on May 1 with six demands, including the reorganization of the city's affirmative action office and the appointment of a new personnel director.

Cambridge, which is 28.4 percent minority according to the most recent U.S. Census, has a tradition of at least some minority elected office holders.

Kenneth E. Reeves '72, elected in 1991, is the city's first Black mayor, and Artis B. Spears is the first Black chair of the board of election commissioners. Two Blacks, Robin A. Harris and E. Denise Simmons, sit on the seven-member School Committee.

But many minority Cantabrigians blame Healy and his personnel department for being unenthusiastic, if not unconcerned, with promoting diversity in the bureaucratic elite.

"You would be hard-pressed to find anyone of minority descent making the decisions," says Reeves. "The whole administration, the whole public health [administration], all of the decision-making is largely [white], largely male."

Tough at the Top

At first glance, Cambridge seems to have achieved it goal of diversity in government. The city work force is a quarter minority, slightly short of the 28.4 percent of the city that is Black, Hispanic or Asian-American.

But those figures conceal the reality of minority hiring in Cambridge, particularly in positions of policy-making, where minorities are rarely appointed as department heads or top-ranking administrators.

In the top levels of the city bureaucracy--where so much of the day-to-day creation of public policy and enforcement of city laws takes place--few people of color are to be found.

For instance, although 40.4 percent of service maintenance workers are minorities, only 14.6 percent of city professional workers are. And a mere 11 percent of officials and administrators are people of color.

The Bigger Picture

In the rest of the country, affirmative action is undergoing a stringent revaluation. The California Civil Rights Initiative, a proposed state referendum, would prohibit race-based employment programs, public education admissions and government contracts. Meanwhile, President Clinton is reviewing the government's affirmative action program as Republicans in Congress attempt to dismantle it.