Though the Postal Service might not come to mind as a great factor in the long march toward social equity in the United States, its policies have had a serious impact on the rights of marginalized Americans since its inception in 1775. Activism, civil rights, and politics are ingrained—at least implicitly—in postal history.
Benjamin Franklin worked for the colonial postal service, controlled by the British, for years before he helped establish the independent American Post Office. Back in 1737, he ran the Philadelphia Post Office where he was focused more on the logistics of such a large operation than on how the institution might affect different demographic groups. Still, his work left a legacy of social transformation.
“Franklin’s methods for organizing the movement of letters provided him with a model for the transformation of colonial subjects into national citizens,” writes Christy L. Pottroff in the edited volume Intermediate Horizons: Book History and Digital Humanities. Franklin observed communications trends, noting, for instance, which cities Philadelphians wrote to most often and in turn increased the frequency of inter-city deliveries to encourage their correspondence. He had invaluable insight into how to help would-be citizens of a budding nation connect with one another.
Many of these letters were delivered by enslaved African Americans, some of whom were forced in the years before emancipation to serve as messengers going relatively short distances between plantations and towns.
“If the inhabitants … should deem their letters safe with a faithful black, I should not refuse him,” Postmaster General Timothy Pickering wrote in 1794 regarding a mail route in Maryland. “I suppose the planters entrust more valuable things to some of their blacks.”
Yet this trust was soon eroded as slave rebellions increased throughout the Americas, and, in 1802, Black Americans were banned from carrying mail until Reconstruction.
The Post Office Department, like the rest of the federal government, updated its policies to become more inclusive in its hiring practices over the centuries. But the Post Office was unique in hiring Black Americans and white women beginning in significant numbers in the 1860s—before either group had been granted the right to vote nationwide (white women got it in 1920; Black men in 1870). Postal jobs were generally desirable. They were salaried and safe.
“For nearly two centuries after the founding of the United States, federal postmasters occupied a distinctive place in the nation’s culture and political structure,” Benjamin R. Justesen writes in the North Carolina Historical Review. “Appointed by political representatives to perform a highly visible public service, postmasters embodied both the highest aims of public service and the somewhat lower goals of partisan patronage, with varying degrees of effectiveness.”
Postmasters, Justesen explains, were “the most widely visible of all federal appointees outside Washington,” and politicians appointing a growing number of Black postmasters during and after Reconstruction had a significant impact on race relations.
In Southern post offices, predominately white clientele balked at conducting personal transactions with Black postal employees. “In many small towns or rural areas, postmasters operated out of their homes or small stores, forcing white customers in [B]lack-managed post offices to visit unfamiliar residential areas,” Justesen writes. Tension and complaints grew in the 1890s as a record-breaking number of Black postmasters were appointed by Republican politicians in the South, courting and rewarding the Black vote. Yet, as the Smithsonian National Postal Museum makes clear, Black postmasters suffered the backlash of this visibility and respect—falling victim to harassment, violence, and murder.
By the time President Theodore Roosevelt was in office, he used the Post Office as a test-case for his “square deal,” a principle of fairness he intended would inform all policies going forward. In late 1902, the town of Indianola, Mississippi, attempted to drive out Minnie Cox, the first Black postmistress in the state. Roosevelt refused to replace Cox with a white person or to accept her resignation, opting instead to suspend service at that location. Cox endured months of death threats before fleeing the state, and “the Indianola Affair” became a symbol of the professional heights Black people could achieve as well as the violence they might endure even with federal support.
Undeterred, Black postal workers faced the backlash to their employment and continued to fight for civil rights. Herbert Hill, national labor director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1951 to 1977, said that when he visited towns looking for volunteers to lead civil rights activities, “there would be the minister, the undertaker, the lawyer and the post office worker.” Several letter carriers—such as John L. LeFlore and Westley W. Law—were activists for desegregation and other civil rights and held onto their jobs even though they were challenged. Notably, Houston mail carrier Heman Marion Sweatt was the successful plaintiff in the 1950 US Supreme Court case Sweatt v. Painter, the precursor to Brown v. Board of Education.
Today, Black employees make up more than a fifth of the postal workforce, according to the National Postal Museum, yet no person of color has ever been installed as Postmaster General.
From 1872 until 1971, the Post Office Department was an official part of the president’s cabinet, and the postmaster general was in the line of presidential succession. Now appointed by the Board of Governors of the US Postal Service (whose members are Senate-approved presidential appointees), it continues to be a high-ranking federal position, showing the postal service’s important influence on the country’s operations. Only one postmaster general—the 74th—has not been a white man: Megan Brennan was the first woman to serve in the role, from 2015 to 2020.
In addition to questions of who is allowed to manage and deliver the mail, the matter of what can be delivered to Americans’ postal boxes has also had implications for social equity. The post office is governed by strict federal laws on mail’s privacy which could potentially have made the postal service a haven for activists and marginalized people to communicate safely. Due to the Comstock Act of 1873, this wasn’t the case. The act prohibited any mailing of “obscene” material, leaving obscenity undefined. Courts allowed an expansive interpretation of the law, and postal officials were given authority to censor the mail, confiscating and destroying items related to birth control, sexuality, and political subversiveness and taking legal action against those who sent any such materials.
“Led by Anthony Comstock, postal officials deemed obscene many freethought and anarchist publications, often for opposing legal regulation of marriage and for providing sexually explicit information about contraception,” David M. Rabban writes in the Stanford Law Review. Consequently,
[t]he editors and authors of these publications, including future founders of the Free Speech League, were occasionally fined and imprisoned after court proceedings. Libertarian radicals in the late nineteenth century at times invoked the freedom of speech and press against the Comstock Act, but only with the creation of the Free Speech League in 1902 did an organization advocate these rights for viewpoints its members opposed.
The Free Speech League, an antecedent of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), didn’t succeed in its goal—the Comstock Act is still in effect, though it’s been amended several times and court rulings have diminished its scope. Though Congress removed references to mailing contraception in 1971, it’s been increasingly discussed in recent years as a way to once again suppress mail delivery of medication that induces abortion owing to the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court decision.
More to Explore
Going Postal at the Qiaopiju
This would hardly be the first time the Court has weighed in on mail delivery. The Post Office played an important role in the early LGBTQ+ rights movement as activists distributed publications in the 1940s and ’50s offering community resources and information delivered directly to homes. When the postmaster of Los Angeles, Otto K. Olesen, refused to mail one of these publications, claiming it was obscene, its publisher sued Olesen in federal court, asserting that the magazine was educational, not pornographic. In 1958, the Supreme Court sided with the publication—ONE—paving the way for more critical LGBTQ+ organizing and resource-sharing by post.
Activists have used the mail for their campaigns and organizing in many ways over the years. Political campaign mailings, letter-writing campaigns to representatives, distributing newsletters, and other methods of using the mail for advocacy have been a part of the postal service before, during, and after the height of the Comstock Act. Abolitionists used the postal service to distribute literature in the nineteenth century—especially northerners sending mailings to change southerners’ minds—but the mail campaigns drew the ire of pro-enslavement Americans who felt the federal government was aiding the cause of abolition by facilitating these mailings. In 1835, an anti-abolition mob raided the Charleston, South Carolina, post office and, with the help of the city postmaster, burned bundles of abolitionist newspapers.
“The Charleston and New York City postmasters soon reached a formal agreement that abolitionists could no longer transmit their periodicals through the mails to South Carolina, since the content violated southern law, tradition, and opinion,” Peter J. Wosh writes in The American Archivist. Similarly,
Amos Kendall, the nation’s postmaster general, adopted an extreme states’ rights position and suppressed the periodicals in the interest of buttressing local mores. In the long run, however, the post office helped to redefine the nature of community and undermined local control over information flow. As the events of the 1830s indicated, competing social groups and conflicting interests would continue to battle over postal policy and, implicitly, control over the nation’s information network.
Activists continue to use the postal service for campaigns in the twenty-first century, even with the invention of e-mail. Anti-war activists mailed President George W. Bush bags of uncooked rice in the early 2000s as a campaign to encourage him to send food instead of bombs to Iraq. In 2012, Texas women mailed hand-knitted uteruses to Rick Perry and other politicians as a protest against their policies on reproductive freedoms.
Mail ballots have made voting more accessible, removing barriers to voting—such as waiting in long lines and lack of transportation to polls—that disproportionately affect working people and marginalized groups. Research shows voting by mail increases turnout for people with lower income, Black people, Asian American people, Latinx people, and those with lower levels of formal education. Elderly people, people with disabilities, transgender people, people living in rural areas, and others all have more accessibility when voting by mail as well. Consequently, the USPS impacts election outcomes, a reason the position of postmaster general continues to hold sway.
Weekly Newsletter
Even what is used to send the mail has implications for social equity. Postal stamps serve as national symbols of who (and what) deserves recognition. Until 1902, men were the only people pictured on postage in the United States. Then, Martha Washington became the first American woman to be featured on a stamp. David G. Farragut became the first Hispanic American honored on a stamp in 1903, and Booker T. Washington became the first Black American in 1940. It was only in 2006 that a stamp issued by the USPS finally featured an American of Arab descent: Philip C. Habib. Harvey Milk’s stamp in 2014 was notable for the inclusion of rainbow colors on it, though the San Francisco politician wasn’t the first person from the LGBTQ+ community to be featured a stamp. Arguably, these shows of respect mirror the country’s progression toward recognizing these disparate groups. Postage also gives visibility to different causes, such as with the “Disabled doesn’t mean unable” stamp in 1981 and the breast cancer stamp, the sales of which have generated almost $100 million for research since 1998.
On the flip side, stamps may also uphold myths and stereotypes. Pocahontas and Sacagawea, two Native Americans featured on stamps (in 1907 and 1994, respectively), loom large in the national consciousness, but accounts of their lives have typically failed to acknowledge they were both minors who were abused by white colonizers. Their stamps recognize them as national figures but do not acknowledge the extent of their suffering, feeding into false narratives.
The story of the US Postal Service uniquely intersects with American history on privacy rights, censorship, reproductive rights, protest, voting, and discrimination and inclusion based on race, gender, and sexual orientation. Next time you mail a bill or a ballot, remember that you’re participating in a centuries-old institution of social change.
Support JSTOR Daily! Join our membership program on Patreon today.
