ABSTRACT
Drawing on archival materials from the 1940 national census, this chapter examines the prehistory of the United States Census Bureau’s UNIVAC era to reveal the racialization of its data management in the 1930s and 1940s. By placing the bureau’s procedural history of machine tabulation alongside its history of hiring a contingent African American workforce for the bureau’s Washington, D.C. office, this chapter shows how worker surveillance negatively impacted the contingent African American workers charged with conducting it. This chapter also reveals how labor unions and African American newspapers successfully challenged the bureau’s reliance on quantifying worker efficiency. This chapter thus strives to recover the racist history of the bureau’s pre-digital labor surveillance, a history effectively occluded when the US Census Bureau entered the digital age.
