Memo to the People.

I take Trump’s attacks on the Postal Service personally not only because he is conspiring to rig the election by obstructing mail-voting during the pandemic, but because my late Dad worked his life in the Post Office after serving at Tuskegee Moton Field.

Many Black men of his time despite being college educated had few opportunities aside from the post office. My father had graduated from the same liberal arts school as major Minnesota political figures, yet he and his generation-my Uncle included-spent a lifetime making the Post Office work. Check with your friends whose fathers and uncles (now grandfathers) were African American veterans of WWII and Korea.

Despite their brilliance, military service, and college training, they worked at the post office and made it live up to its credo.

My maternal grandfather, who would get his law degree from Western Reserve in the Order of the Coif and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, worked nights at the post office.

This was one of the only consistent opportunities for Black Americans. It seems only too predictable that now when democracy hangs in the balance that Donald Trump and his kakistocracy would seek to disassemble an American institution enshrined first in our Constitution and originally led by Benjamin Franklin in a last gasp effort to disassemble our democracy’s essential ingredient: the ability to vote.

But he will not succeed.

Not only will we vote but in overwhelming numbers. We reject efforts to reduce a legacy of freedom to a racketeering scheme.

The post office will survive as Daniel Webster said in 1830, for the government is “the people’s government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people.”

Of this fact, all future tyrants should be aware.

-Albert Turner Goins