Justice
Let This Delightful Mailman Guide You Through Detroit's Racial Divide
The postal route of Wendell Watkins is ground zero for redevelopment, and perhaps displacement.
Meet Wendell Watkins, a delightful mailman in Detroit. He says he joined the post office because “you get paid pretty well, and you don’t have a boss on you all the time, and you get to meet a lot of people.” Also his grandfather was a mailman and his grandfather “was like the coolest guy in the world.” So he took a test, “got 100,” and received a route. That was more than 26 years ago.
“As it turns out, a lot of things have happened in the mail in the last 30 years,” he says in a teaser for an in-progress documentary called Detroit 48202: Conversations Along a Postal Route. “Maybe 1 percent have been good.”