The Boston Fire Department is no longer required to use affirmative action when hiring, a federal appeals court ruled last week.

The court decision came two days after another court ruled in favor of keeping the affirmative action decree for the Boston Police Department.

Last week’s majority opinion reversed 1974’s Beecher Decree, which required the Boston Fire Department and 55 Boston area departments to hire more minority firefighters until each department’s percentage of minority firefighters matched the city’s minority representation.

In 1974 minorities represented only 0.9 percent of the total BFD, while the minority population was 23 percent.

‘Parity has been reached between the percentage of minority firefighters in the BFD and the percentage of minorities in the city as a whole,’ Judge Bruce M. Selya wrote for the majority opinion, upholding that the decree is no longer necessary.

Selya ruled in favor of the five white firefighters who were turned down for a firefighter position, despite scoring 99 out of 100 points on the Massachusetts Division of Personnel Administration exam. They were refused because the Beecher Decree required the BFD to hire more minority candidates, who scored lower on the exam.

Selya acknowledged that the ruling does not eliminate inequality problems within the BFD.

‘We are not Pollyannas, and we recognize that achieving parity at the firefighter level is not tantamount to saying that all is well in regard to racial and ethnic issues within the BFD as a whole,’ Selya said. He added that the problems left by the ruling are outside of the court’s authority.

Judge Kermit Lipez made the dissenting opinion, saying that the plaintiffs’ argument that the BFD has already reached parity is invalid because it only considers parity for entry-level firefighters and not the higher firefighting ranks.

Currently 40 percent of entry-level firefighters are minorities, while only 6.2 percent above the firefighter are minorities, Lipez said.

‘The fact that only 6.2 percent of the higher ranks of the department is minority may evidence an inescapably slow process of growing diversity throughout the department,’ Lipez said.

Leonard Alkins, president of the Boston NAACP, and Karen Miller, the president of an organization of black firefighters known as the Vulcan Society, told the Boston Globe that they were disappointed by the ruling.

‘We will not sit back and accept this decision, and we will begin to strategize our next move,’ Miller said.

The Boston Fire Department declined to comment.