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Mayor Michael Bloomberg spent much of Wednesday afternoon submitting to detailed questioning from attorneys in this Lower Manhattan office building. At issue is the FDNY's hiring practices, the subject of a lawsuit by the federal Justice Department and the Vulcan Society -- a fraternal order of black firefighters.

"This department has never hired black applicants in a 144-year history. And that needs to change. It needs to be recognized by the mayor and by the commissioner that it has to change, and then they need the will to go forward and change it," Former Vulcan Society President Paul Washington.

For the mayor, it's the third time in a little more than three months he's been forced to give a deposition. The first two times, in a discrimination case against his media company, Bloomberg LP. In this case, a judge has already found that FDNY entrance exams in 1999 and 2002 did discriminate against black and Hispanic applicants. Now, the judge must decide whether that discrimination was intentional.

"One of the definitions of 'intended' is that you know that a test discriminates, and you continue to use it. And I think that's exactly what's happened here," said Vulcan Society attorney Richard Levy.

The city points out it began using a new exam in 2007, and says because of extensive outreach efforts, minority representation is up dramatically, with minorities making up more than a third of the most recent graduating class of probationary firefighters.

Even so, according to the most recent figures, only three percent of firefighters are black, and just six percent are Hispanic, even though each group makes up about a quarter of the city's population.

In any case, with the city continuing to fight this lawsuit, it could be headed to trial this fall on that issue of intent and what the city must do to rectify past discrimination.