A Brief History of Black People & The Postal Service

Feb 24
7 min read

Before the United States Postal Service was founded in 1775 with Benjamin Franklin as the Postmaster General, enslaved Black people were regularly sent out as mail carriers. This continued when Congress was permitted "to establish Post Offices and Post Roads" in 1788. But the Haitian Revolution, which began in 1791, made whites nervous-- and they were eventually banned from carrying mail in 1802. Since then, how have Black Americans become 29-30% of the Postal Service? Scroll down for the history!

Black Postal Workers Became Common During Reconstruction

There were approximately 116 Black postal workers during the Reconstruction era in Charleston, South Carolina, Little Rock, Arkansas, and New Orleans, Louisiana-- and it was an extremely lucrative and desirable job. In 1867, James W Mason of Arkansas was named the first Black Postmaster in Sunnyside. It wasn't uncommon for these men to have other jobs, like Pierre Landry in Donaldsonville, Louisiana. He served as a senator and mayor in addition to serving as the town's Postmaster. To become a Postmaster, one had to be bonded (a financial guarantee), so you had to own property.

After the end of reconstruction in 1877, Republicans who managed to hold onto their power appointed new Black postal employees-- and they faced threats and violence. In 1883, the Pendleton Civil Service Act guaranteed all men the ability to compete for federal jobs. Still, the Postmaster and other senior positions were hard to come by, so it was a big deal in 1897 when George B Hamlet was named Chief Postal Inspector and John P. Green was named a Postage Stamp Agent.

Whites Pressured the Removal of Black Postmasters Like Minnie Cox

Fisk University graduate Minnie Cox was appointed as the first Black postmaster in Indianola, Mississippi in 1891 during the Benjamin Harris administration. She lost her job under Grover Cleveland in 1892 and was reappointed by William McKinley in 1897. With a yearly salary of approximately $1,100, she was known for improving the mail system (that served 3,000 people) and helping locals with their rent. When a white man named A.B. Weeks (and brother-in-law of the mayor) desired her job, he pressured Theodore Roosevelt to fire her and led a campaign of threats. Wrote Deanna Boyd and Kendra Chen for the Smithsonian, "In the fall of 1902, James K. Vardaman, editor of the Greenwood Commonwealth and a white supremacist, began delivering speeches reproaching the people of Indianola for 'tolerating' Mrs. Cox as postmaster. His motive for these speeches was not only to spread his white supremacist message, but also to expel Mrs. Cox from her position with the hopes of obtaining it and the position’s salary for himself. The white townspeople of Indianola began calling meetings and voted to demand that Mrs. Cox resign from her office by January 1, 1903, a year earlier than her commission's end date in 1904. While she refused to step down prior to the end of her term, Mrs. Cox made it known that she would not be a candidate for re-appointment."

The Iconic Stagecoach Mary

Formerly enslaved yet literate, Mary Fields was 60 years old when she began delivering mail by stagecoach in the wild frontier of Montana in 1895. Though she wasn't an employee of the Postal Service, she was a contractor under the Star Routes System, in which people were hired to deliver to hard-to-reach places. Known as "Stagecoach Mary", she traveled the rough terrain of Montana with guns and her mule Moses, in addition to helping out a local convent. The Montana-born actor Gary Cooper remembered seeing her when he was 9-years-old, saying she had a reputation for hard liquor and cigars.
The Photo Rule

In his inaugural address in 1909, William Howard Taft announced that he would not place Black people in federal jobs, reflecting a national pattern of discrimination. Under the next president, Woodrow Wilson, federal departments were segregated. The Railway Mail Association union refused to allow Black people to become members, so Black postal workers created the National Alliance Of Postal and Federal Employees in 1913. There were 1,700 members within a decade. In 1914, the US Civil Service Commission required federal job seekers to include a photo with applications, which impacted Black federal employment. The Photo Rule was not ended until 1940, thanks to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Executive Order 8587.

Despite the Photo Rule, Back people were 15-30% of the nation's postal workers by 1928- a percentage that had begun increasing under the brief presidency of Warren G. Harding. One such worker was the Harlem Renaissance writer Richard Wright, who worked as a clerk from 1928 to the mid-30s sporadically. They faced hard conditions. Described historian A.L. Glenn, "Negro clerks in white crews had special troubles at times. If he was an able clerk, he was often said to be ‘too smart’’ if mediocre, he was labelled indolent and indifferent. In a large crew, he often had one or two friends but had to be alert as to the others."

The Mid-Century Surge

Labor shortages during World War II, along with more Black people moving North during The Great Migration, led to more Black people delivering and handling mail. The federal occupation appealed to many for the same reason that it does today-- a steady job with a respectable salary and pension. The coveted income and prestige that came with being a postal worker was in the same vein as becoming a minister, mortician, or lawyer. It could catapult someone poor into the middle-class. A survey of 843 Black students in 1939 found that most of the 453 boys wanted to be Post Office clerks or mail carriers. By the 1940s, 14% of Black Americans were employed as clerks or mail carriers.

In 1963, Evelyn Brown became the first woman to deliver mail in D.C. since the emergency-laden atmosphere of World War II. Here she is pictured in 1967

Between 1960 and 1966, the Post Office Department was the largest single employer of Black people in the country. In 1969, women were 30 percent of postal employees in Chicago, and 94 percent of those women were Black. Despite their numbers, it was hard for Black workers to get promoted to high-ranking positions. Wrote Gloria Oladipo, "President John F Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925 prohibited discrimination in the hiring of federal employees, with USPS offices across the country posting Equal Employment Opportunity posters and notices where employees could submit complaints."

The 1970s Brought Reform, a Strike, and Litigation

In the sixties, the postal service was growing increasingly unorganized. Wrote Ryan Ellis, "The Post Office faced an economic and operational crisis characterized by rising costs, an expanding deficit, and declines in the quality of service. Post–World War II economic prosperity fed a spike in mail volume that overtaxed the postal infrastructure: Between 1945 and 1970, annual mail volume leaped from 37.9 billion to 84.8 billion pieces, and total postal costs ballooned from roughly $1.1 billion to $7.3 billion. Revenue, however, did not keep pace, rising from $1.1 billion to only $6.3 billion over the same period, leading the Post Office Department to accumulate a deficit in excess of $1 billion by the late 1960s." When mail services shut down for an agonizing three weeks in Chicago in 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered a commission on the matter by Frederick Kappel. The commission suggested a government-owned corporation and the removal of the Postmaster General as a member of the presidential cabinet.

This led to the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970, which created the United States Postal Service. Added Ellis, "The commission recommended transforming the Post Office Department into an independent, self-supporting corporation owned by the federal government. The postal corporation, as the commission called it, would be free to open and close offices; set rates in accordance with sound data; study, borrow, and invest in new technologies; and operate with the efficiency and flexibility of a business. Postal management would be allowed to actually manage. The Kappel Commission argued that the reorganization of the postal service into a business-like model would lead to the elimination of the postal deficit, lower rates, and improved service."

The drafting of the PRA coincided with stagnant wages, and on March 18 1970, over 200,000 postal workers led an 8-day strike. They were pissed that Congress had authorized a 4% raise for postal workers but a 41% raise for themselves. At the time, postal workers did not have the right to collective bargaining-- but Nixon was hesitant to fire anybody because other federal workers threatened to join. With mounting backlogged mail (including draft notices for the poor souls being sent to Vietnam), Nixon relented. The postal workers won a 8% wage increase.

In 1971, four Black men-- John Strachan, Emmett E. Cooper, Jr., Alvin J. Prejean, and Joseph N. Cooper --were placed in high-ranking positions within the USPS. Together, they increased recruitment of Black youth at high schools for employment and put more Black people in positions of power. Still, it was an uphill battle. In 1973, when Napoleon Chisholm of Charlotte, North Carolina, alleged that the USPS refused him promotions and discriminated against Black people with all-white promotion boards, it shook the table. Courts sided with him in Chisholm v United States Postal Service, and some employees were promoted and awarded back pay. By 1979, 4.5% of the USPS's 807 executives were Black (the biggest minority group).

In the 80s, more attention was paid to the work environment of Black postal workers. Per the USPS website, "A study by the New York firm Clark, Phipps and Harris, Inc., in 1983, however, found that minorities were promoted less often, and disciplined more often, than white postal workers. Another study – of newly-hired postal employees in the Boston area in the late 1980s – found that blacks were slightly more than twice as likely to be fired as whites, even controlling for factors like gender, age, drug use, absenteeism, test scores, accidents, and disciplinary infractions."

By the year 2000, Black postal employees were 21% of the postal workforce and in the top 25% of earners of Black workers in the US.