Sending Sisterhood: Building Benevolent Beloved Communities through the United States Postal System

Tuesday, January 21
2:45 to 3:50 p.m.
Roy Room, Dion Family Student Center

Sending Sisterhood: Building Benevolent Beloved Communities through the United States Postal System with Pamela N. Walker, PhD, Assistant Professor of History, University of Vermont  

Dr. Walker’s talk will discuss the new yet hidden in plain sight story of women’s social movement participation during the 1960s through the Mississippi Box Project. The project unfolded through the U.S. postal service, an overlooked government service that was a contentious site in the battle for civil rights. The project allowed ordinary Black women in Mississippi and white women in New England to forge unique relationships and participate in the Civil Rights Movement through the exchange of food, clothing, medicine, letters, and movement information. By the end of the decade, more than six thousand individuals traded goods and letters through the postal system across the Mason-Dixon. Creating their own imperfect beloved communities through the postal service – most without ever meeting in person – Black and white women worked together to literally and figuratively feed the Civil Rights Movement.