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.