There's Always Work at the Post Office: African American Postal Workers and the Fight for Jobs, Justice, and Equality

Introduction

introduction You know a lot of people don’t talk about the history of the post o≈ce when it comes down to blacks. This [the post o≈ce] was a saving grace for the blacks, and most blacks in the post o≈ce back in the early years in the forties and fifties and early sixties, they were educated—master’s degrees, some of them had law degrees, and stu√ like that. —cleveland morgan, New York City letter carrier and 1970 rank-and-file postal wildcat strike activist, New York Letter Carriers Branch 36, National Association of Letter Carriers In February 2003 I gave a lecture on black postal worker history to an audience of about eighty mostly young, black undergraduates at North Carolina Central University in Durham. Few of them had seen or even heard of Robert Townsend’s 1987 film satire of Hollywood racial stereotypes called Hollywood Shu∆e. So they had no reference point for the funny line from the film that I chose for the title of this book. Repeated several times during the film as a kind of black folk adage (either as ‘‘There’s work at the post o≈ce!’’ or ‘‘There’s always work at the post o≈ce!’’), it was also popular among my black coworkers at the West Durham post o≈ce in North Carolina in the 1990s. But when I asked how many of the students had relatives working for the post o≈ce, the majority raised their hands, as if to confirm the film’s aphorism and serve as a reminder of the historical significance as well as continuity of postal work in the black community.∞ Why study the post o≈ce? Not only has it been vital to black community development, but black postal worker activism changed the post o≈ce and its unions. This is a dynamic history, one that involves narratives of migration, militancy, community, and negotiation—and all at a workplace that African Americans saw as being inclusively, not exclusively, theirs. It is a story that crosses boundaries of labor, left (broadly defined as socially progressive activity ), and civil rights history. While black postal worker history has been mostly ignored in historical texts, there is an extensive oral tradition (for the most part unrecorded) of blacks in the post o≈ce. It was not until I left the post 2 | introduction o≈ce in 2000 after twenty years of service (mostly as a letter carrier) and began to research this topic that I heard and read compelling and representative narratives about blacks in the post o≈ce such as the ones that follow. Actor and human rights activist Danny Glover’s parents were postal workers as well as activists in the historically black National Alliance of Postal and Federal Employees (napfe, the National Alliance, or simply ‘‘the Alliance’’), in addition to being active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp) branch in San Francisco.≤ Heman Marion Sweatt, the law school applicant who filed suit and whose name appears as the plainti√ in the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1950 decision Sweatt v. Painter that forced the University of Texas law school to integrate, was a letter carrier and member of both the National Alliance and the naacp. (Sweatt’s father was a founding member and lifelong activist in the National Alliance as well.) The stepfather of Plessy v. Ferguson plainti√ Homer Plessy was Victor Dupart, a postal clerk and Unification Movement activist in late nineteenth-century New Orleans .≥ The father of William Monroe Trotter—co-founder of the 1905 black civil rights group Niagara Movement—was James Trotter, a runaway slave who became a Union Army o≈cer, musician, published author, and postal clerk in Boston from 1865 until 1882, when he resigned after a white man was promoted over him. The father of naacp executive secretary Walter White was an Atlanta letter carrier.∂ Mortimer Weaver, the father of Robert C. Weaver—the first African American appointed to a Cabinet position—was a Chicago postal clerk.∑ Historian Barbara Jeanne Fields’s godfather (who had been a roommate at Howard University with her father) was a postal worker in Washington, D.C.∏ Poet June Jordan’s father—Panamanian-born Granville Jordan—worked as a postal clerk in New York City.π Filmmaker Spike Lee’s grandfather, Jack Shelton, a Morehouse College graduate who was married to a Spelman College graduate and schoolteacher, took on a career in...