Tale of Three Black Postmasters: A Personal Story
As I watch CNN in very small doses these days; I have been following the interrogation by our Democratic Congress as they grill our newly minted current Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. A native New Yorker most recently living in North Carolina as a retired businessman who’s only been in office since May of this year.
I was willing to give him a bit of a break as it is a new job and Federal service has a steep but brief learning curve for most especially under the Trump administration. He was described as a “former logistics executive and a GOP megadonor” in a Washington Post article and clearly qualified for the job.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/08/29/postal-service-dejoy-delays/
The honorable Louis DeJoy is the 75th Postmaster General. The first being Ben Franklin as he follows seamlessly in a long line of patronage appointments as part of the Presidential largesse. It is a highly visible job especially during a pandemic and an election year; hence the CNN coverage. While most politically minded people are worried about voting by mail and the general dismantling of the postal service and curtailing overtime for postal workers. I have been much more moved by the historical importance of the Post Office in shaping black life. I have also been wondering why mail my church sends out during the pandemic is returned without explanation to known addresses of folks who never read emails.
Growing up, my dad and his dad both proudly worked at the Post Office. My mother, a NYC public school teacher. My dad started in 1941. I am not sure when my grandpop started. But he had already completed a career in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and working in the post office kept him closer to home. Most of my dad’s friends who were fellow jazz musicians and artists also worked at the post office and probably unless you were a teacher, or a sleeping car porter or a professional with a university education; it was a sure ticket to what I knew as the black middle class.
I couldn’t help but wonder that Donald Trump unwittingly of course knew by maligning the post office, union jobs and many other foundational public services it may have a disproportionate impact on black folks.
On November 19, 1960, Frayser Lane of the Urban League noted:
Because of the pay and security, the P.O. is the basic foundation for the Negro community . . . P.O. workers have bought more homes and sent more offspring to college than any other segment of our group.[70]
Although in 1960 the Post Office Department was the largest single employer of African Americans in the country, most African-American employees toiled in lower-level positions with little hope for advancement.
— In 1961 Day appointed Henry McGee as regional personnel director for the Chicago Region, the highest position ever held by an African American in the Postal Field Service.
I know and please forgive me and don’t start laughing yet at my naiveté, but until I dug a bit deeper. I had no idea the historical treasure trove the post office had been for upward black mobility even as early as The Post Reconstruction South. https://postalmuseum.si.edu/research-articles/the-history-and-experience-of-african-americans-in-america’s-postal-service-6 .
William Carney was the first black man to earn the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1900 because of his Civil War service. Part of his reward was to serve as a postal letter carrier from 1869 until 1900. Completing military service or having a connection with supporting the federal civil service often allowed black folk entry to urban life and steady well paid work away from the farm or working in service.
The great migration and shift in the post war industrialization in Northern and Midwest cities solidified the role of the post office as both a key service and employer stabilizing and connecting families moving from an agrarian South. The Post Office as a large federal employer also had a strategic role to play in desegregation with the growth of union wage jobs. How that played out locally in Sothern and Northern cities was often impacted by policies often institutionalized by the Post Office. Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson in 1911 worked with President Woodrow Wilson to reinstitute the segregation of federal postal workers https://postalmuseum.si.edu/research-articles/the-history-and-experience-of-african-americans-in-america’s-postal-service-3.
This had a profound affect on black life as its paralleled Jim Crow and black codes that intimidated black folk and reinforced white supremacist policies by the then Southern Democrats who resisted the Republican Party of Lincoln. It would take almost another 40 years to see such change in the role of civil service protections for black life. The rise of labor unions in industry and for government postal workers and railways struck fierce protections for workers when jobs were plentiful in the Post World War II period.
On November, 19, 1960, Frayser Lane of the Urban League noted:
Because of the pay and security, the P.O. is the basic foundation for the Negro community . . . P.O. workers have bought more homes and sent more offspring to college than any other segment of our group.[70]
Although in 1960 the Post Office Department was the largest single employer of African Americans in the country, most African-American employees toiled in lower-level positions with little hope for advancement.
— In 1961 Day appointed Henry McGee as regional personnel director for the Chicago Region, the highest position ever held by an African American in the Postal Field Service.
As the decade came to a close, Congress voted for steep pay increases for postal workers — 6 percent in 1967, 5 percent in 1968, 4.7 percent in 1969, and a total of 14 percent in 1970. Meanwhile, logjams of mail at outdated postal facilities, as well as deepening postal deficits, convinced Congress to reorganize the nation’s postal system. In 1970, Congress passed the Postal Reorganization Act, transforming the United States Post Office Department into the self-funding, quasi-independent United States Postal Service.
As today we look at the Democratic run cities of Chicago, New York and Los Angeles in voting in and supporting a Democratic Presidential candidate and the tight nature of the kind of patronage that could deliver votes; one of my favorite books The Promised Land
The Great Migration and How it Changed America. Alfred A. Knopf 1991 by Nicholas Leman charts by county and by family the migration of blacks from the deep south as the need for black labor declined when the increased utilization of agricultural machinery forcing large groups of blacks to midwestern cities that simply couldn’t absorb them. They received everything but the welcome wagon! EXCEPT ironically like many cultural groups before them they could be relied on when living in closely knit neighborhoods to get out the vote especially as new voters who had been disenfranchised since slavery.
The Post Office as an employer along with the federal government regulations in their housing policies, real estate developments, school desegregation efforts, and patronage jobs in cities had a legacy that paralleled shifts in the demographics and political landscape for the 20th century.https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/african-american-workers-20thc.htm
President Kennedy saw the unique power of the Postmaster General as policy enforcer and vote getter and offered the famously powerful Congressman Dawson from Chicago the prized position of Postmaster General to assure the black vote.
William L. Dawson, Kennedy’s First Pick for Postmaster General (photo courtesy Library of Congress)
President-elect John F. Kennedy named J. Edward Day as Postmaster General on December 17, 1960, but Day was not Kennedy’s first choice for the job.
Soon after his election, Kennedy offered the job of Postmaster General to Democratic Congressman William L. Dawson, a powerful African-American political leader from Chicago. In 1960 Dawson, then an 18-year member of the U.S. House of Representatives, was serving as chairman of the House Government Operations Committee. If appointed Postmaster General, Dawson would have been the first black member of a Presidential cabinet.
To the consternation of many in the black community, Dawson turned down Kennedy’s offer, saying he would rather stay in Congress. Some critics could not believe that a black man would turn down such a historic opportunity — they thought perhaps that the offer was merely a gimmick to score points with black voters.
Corneal A. Davis, a long-time member of the Illinois House of Representatives and associate of Dawson, recalled asking his friend at the time “What the devil is wrong with you?” and Dawson telling him:
I got my own power. Don’t you know when I take that job Kennedy’d be my boss. I’ll be the postmaster general, but I’ll also sign my resignation when I take the job. And when he tells me I’m through, I’m through. And hell, I ain’t going to be through until the people tell me I’m through. *
Dawson continued to serve in Congress until his death in 1970.
* Corneal A. Davis Memoir, Volume II, Interview by Horace Q. Waggoner, 1982, Archives/Special Collections, University of Illinois at Springfield, 173
[http://www.uis.edu/archives/memoirs/DAVISCORNEALvII.pdf, 1/6/2010].
President Lyndon Johnson in office after President Kennedy’s assassination but working closely with Robert Kennedy his brother as Attorney General shepherded in both the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act along with appointing Lawrence O’ Brien as Postmaster General when Dawson refused.
O’Brien’s first duty in assuring timely mail delivery was to keep long held promises to union workers, black civic organizations, federal workers and vote getters was to orchestrate the appointment of three black postmaster to key US major cities. Chicago, Dawson’s home base, Los Angeles, and New York City.
From Left to Right: Postmaster Leslie Shaw, Postmaster General Lawrence O’Brien, and Postmasters Henry
McGee and John Strachan, 1967
Leslie N. Shaw, a successful banking executive, took a 25 percent pay cut to accept the job of acting postmaster of Los Angeles in April 1963. He was appointed postmaster in 1964, and served until 1969.
Henry W. McGee, a 37-year postal veteran who had risen through the ranks from substitute clerk to personnel director for the Chicago Region, was appointed as acting postmaster of Chicago in September 1966 and as postmaster less than two months later. McGee was not only the first black postmaster of Chicago — he was also reportedly the first career postal employee to head a major U.S. Post Office. He served as postmaster of Chicago until March 1972, when he was promoted to manager of the Chicago District, with responsibility for 250 Post Offices, from which position he retired in June 1973.
John R. Strachan, a 22-year postal veteran who had risen through the ranks from substitute clerk to assistant to the director of the New York Region, was appointed as acting postmaster of the New York Post Office in November 1966 and as postmaster in June 1967. He served as manager of the newly created New York Metropolitan Postal Center beginning in 1971 but returned as postmaster of New York in December 1972 and served until his retirement in 1979 at the age of 62.
www.nytimes.com › 1967/05/05 › archives › negro-nomi…
This is when life as I knew it drastically begin to change, the personal met the political and my dad became a political figure. He stopped working three jobs and went to the Post Office full time, making more money than he had made combined while juggling teaching during the day, and working the post office full time in the evenings and weekends. I was 13 years old when my dad was nominated and approved by the Senate. My parents received an invitation to the Inauguration of Lyndon Johnson. He was sworn in by Lawrence O’Brien with then Senator Robert Kennedy in attendance with several thousand black postal workers looking on and having a vision of what might be possible with their new boss installed on the front steps of the Post Office. For so many families, not just my own; opportunities opened with visible tangible rewards. My grandad worked at the Post Office for 39 years and couldn’t ride the elevator to the floor where my dad now worked and managed 40, 000 employees. He had two other big black city Postmasters as trail blazers with political clout to support him toward success and improving how the mail would be delivered by folks who had worked at the post office for years.
john r. strachan, 66, a retired postmaster of manhattan office
www.nytimes.com › 1982/10/04 › obituaries › john-r-stra…
https://about.usps.com/who/leadership/officers/pmg-ceo.htm
If you think who leads doesn’t matter; if you think who votes doesn’t matter; if you think black lives don’t matter; then you’re wrong. This isn’t a story about first negro exceptualism; it is a tale about what happens when we stand by and let public institutions fail and stand by and watch. Did your mom or dad work for the post office? Did it make a difference in your life? How you do think Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and President Trump feel about the US Postal Service, who works at the post office and who now relies on what still may come in the mail.
My dad, my mom, my brother, Robert Kennedy, my sister, me, my cousin, my grandfather, my grandmother, and the postal workers who came to watch that hot summer day in July 1967
By Jacqueline Strachan Laughlin. September 4, 2020
