Census Evolution: From White Supremacy to Racial Justice

Count on Your Census

When the founding framers mandated a Census in the U.S. Constitution, their vision was to generate a database of information about American households and the communities where they lived. That population data, first collected by marshals, now by enumerators, remains the foundation of federal decision making, determining how federal resources are disbursed and political power is apportioned. Dan Bouk, a historian of data and bureaucracies, walks us through the enactment of Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution, the system of white supremacy that was embedded in it, and the transformative role of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s in the evolution of a more just Decennial US Census.