Now threatened, USPS was once a gateway to African-American prosperity
10th September 2020 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
For more than a century and a half, the U.S. Postal Service has played a major role in Black American tradition and development, both as a means of socioeconomic advancement and a usually dependable means of communication and cultural awareness.
That’s now why the effort by many in the federal government to hamper and hamstring the USPS through slashes to funding and administrative disruption has been so dismaying to many in the African-American community, particularly those people for whom the Postal Service is their livelihood.
Stanley Taylor, a retired mail handler for the USPS in New Orleans and a former officer in a local chapter of the National Postal Mail Handlers Union, said the moves by President Trump to cripple the post office have been “devastating” to the Black community because of the service’s importance.
Before landing a job as a mail carrier, Taylor worked in the medical industry and he said employment at the USPS was a blessing for him, as it was for many of his colleagues.
“The stress level as a letter carrier and mail handler was less than when in the critical [health] care field,” Taylor said. “Because of endemic poverty in New Orleans, a post office job and union membership were a ticket to the middle class.”
Taylor said that familial employment in the USPS has often led to the growth of an African-American presence in other respected fields.
“Children of postal workers are doctors and lawyers, and an entrepreneur[ial] class was created,” said Taylor, who worked for the Postal Service from 1981 to 2007 and since retirement has been an activist and advocate for postal employees.
He added that although the NPMHU was slow to integrate locally, the mail handlers union also played a key role in the development of Black financial success. Taylor said Black USPS employees understand the value of organized labor.
“African Americans in the post office are very well educated [compared] to any demographics here in New Orleans,” Taylor said, “and labor relations were not as contentious here as on the East Coast, so even those in management were aware of the union.”
Dr. Philip Rubio, a professor of history and political science at North Carolina A&T University, has extensively researched and written about the role the USPS has played in the blossoming of Black America, including his book, “There’s Always Work at the Post Office: African American Postal Workers and the Fight for Jobs, Justice, and Equality.”
Rubio told The Louisiana Weekly that since the end of the Civil War, government employment such as the post office has been vital for African Americans traditionally because other means of employment and advancement were unavailable to them.
“In the research I conducted for both my books on the post office,” Rubio said, “I found that African Americans found their way into the post office starting with [the] end of the Civil War because of its prestige as a government job, its relative job security and the fact that so many private sector jobs were closed to them.”
That importance of the USPS to the Black community still exists today, which is why the threats to the service’s very existence has been so alarming to African-American employees.
“This remained true over time to this very day,” Rubio said of employment at the USPS. “It could be a career choice or a temporary way station en route to other professions, but African Americans made the post office a destination, not a dead end. Their activism over a century and a half helped transform both the post office and its unions.”
Now, with the rapid approach of one of the most crucial presidential elections in American history, the potential defunding and dismantling of the U.S. Postal Service is threatening the welfare and progress of the African-American population in two ways – not only are thousands of jobs for Black Americans in danger, but the Trump administration’s thinly-veiled goal of minimizing mail-in voting through the disorganization of the USPS could have a disastrous effect on African-American enfranchisement.
“Trump’s attempt to dismantle the USPS, aided by the current postmaster general favored by his administration, is seen with dismay across the country, across different demographics,” Rubio told The Louisiana Weekly. “But African Americans have expressed particular frustration and anxiety at the disappearance of both the jobs and the service that the USPS has historically provided.
“Unfortunately,” he added, “there is no question that Trump not only supports but is helping to spearhead the current Republican agenda of suppressing as many votes as possible by Democrats, including and especially African Americans. Vote suppression is a form of voter disenfranchisement. Trump has made mail-in voting a partisan issue since many more Democrats than Republicans polled have declared their readiness to vote by mail because of the pandemic this year.”
Locally, Stanley Taylor’s frustration and anger at the potential demise of the USPS continue to rise, especially with the election less than two months away. He told The Louisiana Weekly that in New Orleans and elsewhere, the stakes are massive.
Taylor called the attempted dismantling of the Post Office “blatant sabotage” of the election. He asserts that the president is making his intentions perfectly clear, and if he succeeds, the Black community could be devastated.
“Trump just tells you exactly what he’s going to do,” Taylor said. “It’s his only way to win.”
This article originally published in the September 7, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
