Brian Renfroe spent many of his years with the U.S. Postal Service in Mississippi, working his way up in the ranks.
Renfroe, whose postal career took him to Washington, D.C., in 2011, was installed as the President of the National Association of Letter Carriers in December, after being elected to the post.
“I’m humbled by it. I feel very privileged,” he said. “I’m also excited about the opportunity to continue our union’s long history of representing letter carriers.”
A Hattiesburg native, Renfroe spent time in McComb during his childhood.
“I spent a lot of time there with my grandparents and we went to McComb often,” he said. “As a kid I remember spending a lot of time in McComb, going to the mall and to eat supper at different places. If you wanted to go to the movies, you had to go to McComb.”
Renfroe is a 1998 Oak Grove High School graduate and attended Southern Miss to study software engineering. While in college, he went to work for the Hattiesburg Post Office and still planned to finish his degree.
Instead, Renfroe worked as a plumber from 2001-04 until he went to work for the postal service. He was a city letter carrier in Hattiesburg from 2004 to 2011 before moving to Washington, D.C., and working full-time for the NALC.
Renfroe’s parents, Ken and Ginger Renfroe, were born in Monticello and raised in Jayess. Ken was a letter carrier in Hattiesburg from 1977 until his retirement in 2008.
“Obviously, I grew up with my dad being a letter carrier, so I was very familiar with the post office,” Renfroe said. “I just realized that the union gave me an opportunity to work, to be sure that all letter carriers had an opportunity to have a career and retirement like my dad did.”
Renfroe did not plan to be an executive, but he found his niche.
“I just hated school from the first day in kindergarten,” he said. “A letter carrier is a good middle-class job. I just kind of stumbled on the union.”
Renfroe was the President of the NALC Union Branch 938 in Hattiesburg from 2008 to 2011. The union’s territory covered Hattiesburg and Petal to Tylertown to Poplarville.
Renfroe was elected the President of Mississippi State Association of NALC in 2011 and recalled spending a lot of time in McComb those years.
A few months after Renfroe was elected as the President of the NALC Union Branch 938, he was appointed to work at NALC headquarters in Washington D.C., focusing on city delivery issues. He was appointed as a special assistant to the president in 2013. He was elected NALC director of city delivery in 2014, and appointed executive vice president of the NALC in 2016 and later elected to the position in 2018.
He earned 75% of the votes from all members in 2022 to become the NALC president.
Renfroe talked about his achievements before earning the NALC’s highest office.
“I’ve had the opportunity to be involved in collective bargaining with the (United States) Postal Service,” he said. “We also were very involved legislatively and politically. Last April, we got a bipartisan postal reform bill passed in the Congress. It removed a longstanding unfair financial requirement for the postal service and solidified its future.”
