Atlanta Nat Convention

This footage by JoAnn Elam was taken during the 52nd National Convention of the American National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) that was held in Atlanta, GA from August 10 through 16, 1980. From outside the Georgia World Congress Center, it shows the streets of Atlanta and its skyscrapers, as well as NALC delegates heading to the Convention. Elam worked as a letter carrier in Chicago at the time and, as a delegate for Chicago’s Branch 11, she was sent to at least three of the NALC biennial National Conventions in 1978 (Chicago), 1980 (Atlanta), and 1982 (San Francisco). As her personal documents show, Elam was deeply concerned with the work conditions of the USPS employees and with issues of management harassment and gender inequality that she encountered first hand. Her involvement in the postal workers’ labor movement is also manifest in her large collection of print material about Chicago’s mailmen and women, their struggles, and their representation in popular culture, among others. Together with these documents, Elam probably intended to use the footage of the Atlanta National Convention and others like 1st NALC Convention and [Postal Workers’ Washington DC Protest] for Everyday People (1979-1990), a film she spent decades working on and never finished. As she writes in one of her notebooks, Everyday People was supposed to be “about delivering the mail, day-to-day, rather than specific events (1978 strike). Strike, work rules, management harassment, relationship to public-other issues are brought in as they affect day-to-day.”