In 1980, toward the end of a press conference on the state of the census count, Dianne Feinstein, then the mayor of San Francisco, turned toward Census Bureau director Vincent Barabba with a harsh warning: if he didn’t recognize her requests, she said, “We may see you in court.”
In the years leading up to the 1980 Census, the bureau conducted an apology tour of sorts. “We didn’t do as good a job counting black people as we should have,” Barabba conceded to the New York Times in 1974. Under his tenure, the bureau added programs and increased investments at federal and regional levels to increase census outreach in cities, where it was most likely to miss people, and made inroads with Black and Latino leaders, including Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party and other important radicals, in the process of creating new Black and ethnic advisory committees.
In the tradition of the field of Black Studies, the conference, “Black People and the 1980 Census,” crossed disciplinary and political lines. A wide range of participants had been invited to share their perspective on the census and how its skewed picture of the country’s population affected their work and communities. That list included organizers representing the South Shore Housing Center, the Woodlawn Organization (TWO), MALDEF (the Mexican American Legal Defense & Educational Fund), and Chicago’s Native community, to name a few; Chicago Public Schools deputy superintendent and chief operating officer Manford Byrd; Illinois First District representative Bennett M. Stewart and Mississippi senator Henry Kirksey; and Census Bureau deputy director George Hall (who attended in place of Barabba, who had fallen ill), among others—in short, a “who’s who” in Black politics, scholarship, and Chicago organizing. For a census gathering, it was monumental.
Bailey had arrived at this conclusion using data made available by National Urban League research director Robert Hill, one of the people most responsible for shepherding the issue of the differential undercount into public view in the 1970s. The ICBS had invited Hill to present on a procedure he had developed, through which the bureau could do just that—eliminate the undercount of every racial and ethnic group through an adjustment process.
Despite the bureau’s ambivalence, it was clear that Hill’s method was not going to fly under the radar. By 1979, Stanford Research Institute had recommended its use in the Office of Revenue Sharing, and the bureau had used the method to calculate the effects of adjustment on funding and political representation in response to a demand for such information by the National Urban League in 1975. The bureau was planning its own undercount conference for February 1980, and had even invited Hill to present his work.
The case, Young v. Klutznick, was closely followed by the media, but it wasn’t the only one that year. At least 51 other cases were filed against the bureau, the majority filed by cities, which had also come to question whether “Get Out the Count” initiatives would be enough to minimize the differential undercount.
