Post offices’ vitality
Town ex-slaves founded southwest of Houston fears possible cuts; political fight highlights role such facilities play in rural areas
KENDLETON — To Black residents whose ancestors built this rural town amid cotton fields 50 miles southwest of Houston, 77451 is more than a ZIP code.
“It’s very important for us to keep our identity. That’s our address, our ZIP code,” said Mayor Darryl Humphrey Sr., because of “all the fighting and the work that my forefathers did.”
Kendleton began when slaves were freed in Texas in 1865 — more than two years after emancipation. William Kendall sold them 100-acre plots of his plantation along the San Bernard River south of Houston. Many signed the land deeds with a mark because they were illiterate.
Those first settlers turned Kendleton into a “freedmen’s colony” with its own school, church, cemetery and a mercantile that contained a post office.
As the political fight over recent cuts to the U.S. Postal Service and changes to voting by mail plays out across the country ahead of the presidential election, it’s highlighting the vital role of post offices in rural communities such as Kendleton, where Black people have long had to fight for the right to vote.
Humphrey, 57, a retired electrical lineman, counts the town’s first mayor among his ancestors. Other Black farmers managed to buy land during Reconstruction, but it was often taken — through inflated assessments, tax sales and theft by white farmers. But Humphrey’s family kept their land, as did many others in Kendleton. Humphrey grew up attending Juneteenth celebrations at the picnic grounds that drew Black crowds from across surrounding Fort Bend
County.
The Kendleton postmaster, like the mayor, school principal and other leaders, was Black. But they operated in a still-segregated South, where starting in 1889 Dixiecrat Democrats called “Jaybirds” handpicked candidates before elections, ensuring they were white.
Local Black leaders braved death threats to file a successful class-action lawsuit, which reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1953, overturning the whites-only primaries. They renamed a street in town after one of the plaintiffs, Willie Melton, and in 1993 the government erected a free-standing brick post office there with a plaque out front commemorating the landmark lawsuit.
In the years that followed, the post office scaled back its hours and required residents to pay for one of about 1,000 boxes even as Kendleton grew. When the government tried to close the post office in 2011, locals protested, lobbied state lawmakers and kept it open. More recently, Humphrey has been fighting to ensure that online orders — and associated sales tax revenue — go to Kendleton. Often mail, including his, is automatically routed to the neighboring town of Beasley. When Humphrey calls customer service, he ends up arguing, “How can I live in Beasley? I’m the mayor of Kendleton!”
About 1,000 people live within the city limits, with about 2,000 more in the surrounding area, the mayor said. During the pandemic, Kendleton post office window hours were reduced to two hours — 10 a.m. to noon. Many residents who had started to vote by mail because of their age and the pandemic heard about Postal Service cutbacks ahead of the presidential election and grew concerned.
Humphrey doesn’t trust the Trump administration not to use his post office as a pawn, even after the postmaster general promised last week to suspend any cuts until after the election.
On the other side of town, across the railroad tracks, retired postal worker Kathryn Ford was leading a tour of the local museum, including exhibits about the post office, the voting rights struggle and George Floyd (made by her granddaughter, who’s dating Floyd’s brother).
“We have survival skills,” she said, “It’s in our DNA.”
But Ford, 82, who votes by mail, said the Postal Service had been “handicapped” by cuts, including reduced hours and equipment.
“They’ve removed so much,” she said.
Franklin Crump, 64, is an Army veteran who also worked for the Postal Service for years, at a Houston processing center, before retiring five years ago to Kendleton. He worries that postal workers won’t have the resources to simultaneously process mail-in ballots and daily mail.
“I’m thinking they’re going to have to stop this for the ballots,” Crump said as he picked up his mail Wednesday, including a prescription from the Veterans Affairs Department.
“This is a priority,” he said of the medication. “I don’t know how they’re going to handle that.”