The postal service barred Black employees to prevent them forming communication networks.
Evidence
- Samuel Krislov has recorded an interesting episode that confirms the growing concern for Black resistance in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: “In 1802 in a confidential letter to the chairman of a Senate committee, Postmaster General Gideon Granger urged [passage of a Post Office provision which forbade Black employment], suggesting there were objections to Negro mail carriers ‘of a nature too delicate to engraft into a report which may become public, yet too important to be omitted or passed over without full consideration.’ Such a role as distributing the mail might teach Negroes the pernicious doctrine ‘that a man’s rights do not depend on his color.’ The Postmaster General cautioned against ‘everything which tends to increase their knowledge of natural rights, of men and things, or that affords them an opportunity of associating, acquiring and commuting sentiments, and of establishing a chain or line of intelligence.’” Krislov, The Negro in Federal Employment, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1967, p. 9. The provision was passed and remained in law (if not in practice) until 1865. See also Mary Frances Berry, op. cit., pp. 1–17. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1728
Categorization
- CANDY: A US Postmaster General feared Black mail carriers would acquire ‘a chain or line of intelligence’ — the state literally banning Black information networks, in force to 1865.
- SHARE: Send to anyone studying surveillance of Black organizing or the postal service’s role in social control.
- SEED: Angle: postal networks as infrastructure of both freedom and control — from Granger’s 1802 ban to the Underground Railroad era’s mail-based organizing.