One of my very favorite photographs of Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman elected to the United States Congress, captures her mid-stride as she makes her way to the front entrance of a Brooklyn home. Undaunted by what looks like recent rainfall, Chisholm’s face, framed by her distinctive cat-eye glasses, is focused. The New York City native is smartly dressed, to be sure, but perhaps her most striking accessories are the identification badge on her lapel and the slim bag slung over her left shoulder emblazoned with the words “U.S. CENSUS” and “1970” on the side. Chisholm, as it turns out, was not door-knocking solely in her capacity as a member of the United States House of Representatives, but also in her capacity as a census-taker.

Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm announcing her candidacy for presidential nomination, January 1972. From the Library of Congress.

As a nineteenth-century historian, I have a particular appreciation for this photograph. Unrelated though it may seem, I love it because of how it allows us to reframe the long Black freedom struggle. Let me explain.

Like many of its predecessors, the 1970 census was dogged by controversy. The Census Bureau was accused of having bungled yet another enumeration, leading to an undercount of the country’s population. A subcommittee on Census and Statistics, which was charged with examining the “accuracy” of this most recent iteration of the decennial count, cited a number of potential problems including out-of-date maps, lax enumerators, a poorly conceived and poorly distributed self-enumeration questionnaire, and widespread concerns about privacy within a society confronting “increasing alienation.” ¹

While this might all sound like the impossibly dry stuff of bureaucracy, the census is in many ways the lifeblood of democracy. Of course, the decennial enumeration helps dictate the apportionment of congressional seats as well as the distribution of federal funds. On a deeper level, however, it helps determine just who counts. This is precisely what makes the census so—and you will just have to trust me on this one—thrilling. ²

To “count” is polysemic. To count is to determine the total number of people or things, but it is also the condition of being deemed significant, of mattering. Crucially, the census collapses these two meanings.

Census Population Clock Dept of Commerce, 1971. From the Library of Congress.

This fact was not lost on Chisholm, who understood the stakes of not being counted. In a statement made to the subcommittee on Census and Statistics, she noted that “the census-taking mistakes are not uniform” and that “those most likely to be and unfortunately [are] undercounted are the racial and ethnic minorities in slum areas.” Indeed, the subcommittee noted that undercounting was common in “inner city areas,” places with higher proportions of low-income, non-white residents, a number of whom were non-native English speakers. Not only was the census schedule oftentimes illegible within these communities, but so, too, were these communities illegible to at-best oblivious census-takers. The “inadequately trained and thoughtlessly selected enumerators” were often perceived by “a people living in the ghettos of the American dream” as “symbols of a discriminating society which distorts their basic rhythm of life.” It is no wonder, then, that census-takers were met with “general skepticism” and “individual hostility.” The result for the residents of the country’s “inner cities”? “They are not counted, they are not considered,” summarized Chisholm, evoking her perfect understanding of the dual meaning of counting. ³

A family takes part in the 1970 Census with an unidentified Census worker, April 1970. From Wikimedia Commons.

And it is precisely this understanding that drove Chisholm, the daughter of Afro Guyanese and Afro Barbadian immigrants to New York City, into the rain-streaked streets of her community in 1970. “The political representatives of the ghetto dweller, an undercounted mass, are deprived of the value of their votes,” she maintained, “votes which can be the keys of a new tomorrow.” Chisholm noted that because the appropriation of funds necessary to support public assistance programs was tied to the census results, accuracy mattered. Concluding her statement addressed to the subcommittee, the congresswoman-cum-enumerator argued that “now is the time to make the census a functional and meaningful tool, for tomorrow is too late.”

This was not a plea to do away with the census; this was a plea to make it better.

If I bring up the example of Shirley Chisholm, it is because I think she can be situated within a surprisingly long line of African Americans who not only believed that the decennial census could be redeemed, but who tied a politics of liberation to the production of accurate data. I say “surprisingly,” because we are perhaps unaccustomed to thinking about the long Black freedom struggle through the lens of quantification.

“Taking the Census” by Francis William Edmonds, 1854. From the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In my recent article in the Journal of the Early Republic, I explore how Black New Yorkers of a different sort similarly made a case for statistical accuracy, this time in relation to the infamous census of 1840. When, as a result of a series of clerical errors, the latter appeared to conclude that free African Americans in the North experienced higher rates of mental illness, poverty, and criminality than their enslaved counterparts in the South, slavery’s defenders pounced. Here it was, they alleged, further proof that Blackness and freedom were incompatible! But rather than doing away with the census wholesale, rather than viewing quantification as epistemologically flawed, numerate Black activists petitioned for a more accurate statistical representation. Not unlike African Americans in the twentieth century, antebellum Black men and women were “very suspicious of all white enquirers into their numbers, and condition,” and so it is no wonder they made the case for—among other things—locating data production within their own communities. Armed with more accurate data, Black activists would not only lay bare the brutality of slavery but also reveal the resilience of free African Americans and the communities they had built. ⁴

This example, not unlike that of Shirley Chisholm nearly 130 years later, is a reminder, then, that when folks ask to be counted, they are often also asking to be considered, too.

Endnotes

¹ U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Subcommittee on Census and Statistics, Accuracy of 1970 Enumeration and Related Matters: Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Census and Statistics of the Committee on Post Office and Civil Service, 91st Cong., 2nd sess., 1970, 1–2.

² On the intertwinement of the census and democracy, see Dan Bouk’s elegant and incisive Democracy’s Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them (New York, 2022).

³ U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Accuracy of 1970 Enumeration and Related Matters, 269.

4 “The Free Colored Population,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, June 26, 1851.