A federal appeals court ruled Friday that the Chicago Fire Department must hire 111 black firefighter candidates previously passed up for the jobs, according to The Chicago Sun-Times.
The city must also pay "tens of millions of dollars" in damages to 6,000 others.
The 111 new firefighters will have their pensions adjusted as if they had been on the job since 1995.
The decision by the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upholds a unanimous ruling made last year by the U.S. Supreme Court that the candidates hadn't waited too long before filing a discrimination lawsuit over the way the city handled a 1995 entrance exam.
The case will now be sent back to the trial court to implement a "hiring remedy," according to the report.
The lawsuit claimed that the exam did not measure the ability to be a firefighter and made it more than six times more likely that white applicants would be hired rather than blacks.
The city established a cutoff score of 89 for the exam and hired randomly from the top 1,800 candidates, 78 percent of whom were white.
