ATLANTA --- A "whites only" sign was still hanging on the precinct house water fountain in 1964 when James Booker joined the suburban College Park police force. He soon learned it wasn't the only thing off limits to Georgia's new black recruits.
Until 1976, black officers were blocked from joining a state-supported supplemental police retirement fund. Today, white officers who entered the fund before that year are taking home hundreds of dollars more every month in retirement benefits than their black counterparts.
The now-retired black officers have been lobbying to change that, but eight years after they began, an effort to amend the state constitution and give them credit for those years is stalled in the Legislature. The Georgia Constitution prohibits the state from extending new benefits to public employees after they have retired. If lawmakers don't take action in the final weeks of the legislative session, the battle will move to the courthouse this spring, said state Rep. Tyrone Brooks, an Atlanta Democrat and civil rights activist leading the officers' campaign.
"I was hoping we wouldn't have to go this route, but litigation appears to be our only option," Mr. Brooks said.
Ronald Hampton, the executive director of the National Black Police Association, said he knows of no other state with a similar pension situation.
"Only Georgia is shameless enough to still have this out there," Mr. Hampton said.
The House has twice passed an amendment resolution, but it has gone nowhere in the Senate.
"We can't fix everything for everybody," said state Sen. Bill Heath, the chairman of the Senate Retirement Committee. The Republican argued that retroactive changes to retirement benefits "opens up a can of worms and could destroy the pension system." Georgia's first black officers, were hired in the late 1940s. The numbers slowly rose in the 1950s and 1960s as the civil rights struggle raged. Although the federal Civil Rights Act in 1964 outlawed employment discrimination, change in the ranks was slow.
Officials don't dispute that participants in the retirement plan before 1976 were almost exclusively white.
"That appears true, but we weren't keeping those kinds of records," said Robert Carter, the secretary-treasurer of the Peace Officers Annuity and Benefit Fund of Georgia.
The fund supplements officers' municipal or county pensions. Officers make monthly contributions and the state adds money collected from tickets and fines.
Mr. Booker, who worked in the College Park police force for more than three decades before he retired, said he would be pulling in an extra $770 a month if he had been allowed to join the fund at the beginning of his career.
Instead, at age 76 he is still working part-time directing traffic to make ends meet.
Legislators did enact a partial remedy in 2006, passing a bill allowing current officers who were employed before 1976 to buy into the fund for those earlier years. Only four did, Mr. Carter said. And that law didn't address the estimated 100 to 200 black officers who had already retired.
Time is running out, as some retirees have died and others are ailing.
"You wonder sometimes are they just waiting for us to all die," Mr. Booker asked.
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