Governing Documents of an Early African-American Trade Union

[African Americana]: [Postal History]:

Constitution and By-Laws of the National Alliance of Postal Employes [sic] 1923 [cover title].

[N.p. 1923]. 23pp. Original yellow wrappers printed in black, stapled. Very minor edge wear. Clean internally. Near fine. Item #3923

A seemingly-unrecorded pamphlet containing the governing documents of an important African American trade union, the National Alliance of Postal Employees. According to the Department of Labor's 1926 Handbook of American Trade-Unions: "In 1913 the National Alliance of Postal Employees was organized by the colored postal men. It is composed chiefly of men in the Railway Mail Service, but its jurisdiction is not restricted to any one branch, its aim being one organization for all colored workers in the Postal Service." The government's handbook did not reveal the reason the NAPE was founded at all: African American workers were not allowed to join the all-white Railway Mail Association in 1913. So African American postal employees started their own union, founded in Chattanooga, Tennessee on October 6, 1913. By 1923, the union admitted all African Americans in the U.S. Postal Service and numbered about 1,700 members two years later. The union would continue to grow and expand its representation outside the postal service, eventually changing its name to the National Alliance of Postal and Federal Employees. By the late-1960s, the union represented over 30,000 members, most of whom were African American employees.

The present work contains the union's laid out in seventeen articles, the by-laws, the "Ritual of the Alliance" and order of business for their meetings, and the required text for member initiation, officer installation, and meeting closings. The final section of the work lists the group's regional "Scheme of Organization," defined in eleven districts beginning with the first district (Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona) and ending with the eleventh (Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and the northeast). Most of the districts in Deep South are comprised of just two states, i.e. the third district comprised of Alabama and Florida.

OCLC records scant information on any aspect of the NAPE, and just one institutional holding of any edition of their Constitution and By-Laws before 1970 - a 1938 edition held by the Yale Law Library. We could locate no copies of the present edition.

Price: $550