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A retired Durham letter carrier, Philip F. Rubio, who holds a Ph.D in history from Duke and teaches at N.C. A&T, has written a remarkably good book, but he stumbles with the delivery.

“There’s Always Work at the Post Office: African American Postal Workers and the Fight for Jobs, Justice and Equality” chronicles the history of “civil rights unionism” that culminated in the wildcat postal strike of 1970.

The title? Yes, he says he lifted it from Robert Townsend’s 1987 film, “Hollywood Shuffle,” where the line is used several times satirically.

Civil rights unionism is a concept he credits to historians Michael Honey of the University of Washington at Tacoma and Robert Korstad of Duke. But Rubio expands it to inform his research into the labor and civil rights struggles inside the post office. Rubio worked for the post office for twenty years, mostly as a letter carrier in West Durham. He delivered mail on Duke’s East Campus.

That’s a remarkable story, too, according to the Duke news bureau. In 1993, a group of graduate students invited him to host a weekly jazz show on WXDU, the campus radio station. They had learned of his interest in jazz.

Hosting the show, and learning about Duke, Rubio realized the university offered him a way to combine his interests in oral history, labor and African American studies. He held a master’s degree in history from N.C. Central. In 2000, he took an early retirement from the post office and entered a Duke doctoral program in history at age 50. He earned his Ph.D in 2006.

In his introduction to the book, he says Honey and Korstad define civil rights unionism as leftist antiracist union activity in the South at mid-twentieth century as practiced by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the Communist Party USA. The goal was better jobs and equal political and legal rights.

Rubio says this fight is “part of an older and broader black protest tradition. Few black postal workers or their allies were known to have been members of the CPUSA or the CIO. But black postal worker-activists and their formations were stronger and more consistent civil rights union role models than the CIO or CPUSA. In the post office, civil rights unionism has been embodied in the National Alliance and the National Postal Union … as well as the efforts of black postal workers and their allies in the AFL-CIO postal unions to break Jim Crow.” The National Alliance and the National Postal Union were predominately black.

Got it?

The battle against white supremacy – an ideology – and its manifestations in segregation, disenfranchisement and the denial of civil rights, was fought on ideological grounds, changing hearts and minds. This history, then, becomes a story of competing ideologies. It gets arcane, as ideological battles do. Think of say, the fights within a Baptist church to get an idea of the hair-splitting and earnestness here.

But Rubio shows how the post office, early on, became a hothouse for change. Within its walls, the African American struggle for justice and equality took the form of many currents, all with tributaries. His story, though, gets snagged by detail and reads for page after page like the minutes of debates at a convention of a minor political party, where resolution follows resolution and the ayes don’t have it. It’s the kind of narrative that only a dissertation committee could relish.

But that doesn’t detract from his accomplishment. Well, it does, actually. Yet Rubio appears to have single-handedly rescued an important part of African American history. He provides insights into how the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was of a piece with the postal strike of 1970, the largest wildcat strike in U.S. labor history. Both were outcomes of the same struggle for rights, justice and equality.

Other than his own experience, why the post office? It has been vital to black community development, and activism by black postal workers changed the post office and its unions, Rubio says.

He cites for a couple of pages the ties to the post office of many well-known African Americans: actor Danny Glover, the first black Cabinet member Robert C. Weaver, poet June Jordan, filmmaker Spike Lee, historian John Hope Franklin, N.Y. Congressman Charles Rangel, former Detroit Mayor Coleman Young, Tuskegee Airmen Hiram Little and Percy Sutton, activist and comedian Dick Gregory, novelist Richard Wright, jazz musician Charles Mingus. Singer-songwriter Freddie Gorman, a former letter carrier, wrote the 1961 hit for Motown’s Marvellettes, “Please Mr. Postman.”

The historical connection between the black community and the post office is so strong that the post office functioned as “an avenue of black mobility and incubator of black struggle,” he said.

How did this happen?

For a long time, the post office was the country’s largest public agency. It was the place for political patronage jobs. But postal regulations, in perhaps the country’s first labor law, restricted employment to “free white persons only.” After the Civil War, black veterans of the Union army were among the first African Americans to join the post office work force.

The first known black postal worker was William Cooper Nell in Boston. The postmaster who hired him in 1863 was an abolitionist. Nell had been a political activist in New York City a year before his Boston appointment.

Blacks began serving as postmasters after the Civil War as rewards by elected Republican candidates for their support, even in the South. Congress passed the Civil Service Act in 1883, establishing merit exams for jobs in the post office. “Black college graduates in particular seized the opportunity,” Rubio says.

Then, along came Jim Crow as the twentieth century approached. Social change can be won and quickly crushed, Rubio notes, citing W.E.B. Du Bois’s characterization of Reconstruction as “a splendid failure.”

If a black applicant scored high on the civil service exam that did not mean the applicant would get the job. The “rule of three” permitted personnel officers to choose one of three applicants from each batch of applications for a position. Then, there was the requirement of a photograph with each application. The process was anything but color-blind, yet blacks continued to win jobs at the post office but were effectively blocked from the more desirable ones.

Unions, although without the right of collective bargaining, were part of the postal office work place. The National Alliance was a black labor organization within the post office “led by college-educated intellectuals.” It’s first president, Henry L. Mims, was a graduate of Howard University. Although unions were strongest in the Northeast and Midwest, the Alliance was founded in 1913 in the South, “where most black railway mail service workers lived, before it headed north.” At one time, the railway mail service clerk was an elite post office job.

The Alliance gave black activists the opportunity to fight for civil rights as well as labor rights, Rubio says. While to the left of the predominately white labor organizations in the post office, the Alliance “operated within accepted middle-class mores of negotiation rather than confrontation with management.” It became closely allied with the black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the NAACP and developed ties with black social organizations. “In that way it embodied both black labor and civic traditions.” Unlike other postal unions, both black and white, it put equality first.

James B. Cobb, a native of Durham and a Howard University graduate, was elected president in 1941 of the largest branch of the Alliance in Washington. He won on a platform of “complete integration throughout the post office.” With help from the NAACP, the Alliance in the previous year had succeeded in getting President Franklin Roosevelt to abolish the civil service application photographs.

Roosevelt’s executive order “enhanced the post office even more as an employment magnet for African Americans.” Black veterans returning from World War II gained greater access to post office jobs through proactive veterans’ hiring preferences, Rubio says. They were keenly aware of the discrimination in an agency of the government they had helped defend. The National Postal Union, another black labor organization in the post office, was more militant than the Alliance in its approach to the black agenda. The Alliance was part of the civil rights establishment, but with growing unrest among the rank and file.

“By the late 1960s postal unions seemed to be on a collision course with the federal government,” Rubio says. Pay had not kept up with inflation as the volume of mail increased by one-third. Working conditions were poor in old urban post offices. President Richard Nixon and Congress deferred postal pay raises in a push for the creation of a postal corporation. Many postal workers in New York City qualified for food stamps. Workers grew increasingly impatient and angry with postal management and their union leaders.

In March 1970 about 200,000 postal workers, blacks and whites, walked off the job for eight days, defying the government and their own union leaders. Although not coordinated, it began in New York and spread to 200 cities, Rubio says. Nixon declared a state of emergency and called out 22,000 troops to try to get the mail moving again.

The strike, the largest ever against the federal government, won its big demands. When Nixon signed into law the postal reorganization act in August 1970, creating the postal corporation we have today, it included substantial pay raises and granted full collective bargaining rights. The Alliance, though, chose to remain independent and was shut out of the bargaining process.

Although today competition from the Internet and automation is forcing a decline in the postal work force, it remains one of the leading employers of women and minorities in the country. Rubio says that in 2008, 39 percent of postal employees were minorities. He says that diversity is a result primarily of the fight led over the years by African Americans.

Rubio’s book is a substantial achievement, researched enough to make your eyes roll, but far from an easy read. It is so detailed that you can hardly see the forest for the forest.