1 Measure for Measure for Measure

Three Eras in American Racial Census Taking

The Great Emancipator and the Geostatistical Imagination (1790–1860)

In the U.S. Capitol building, above the Senate chamber’s west staircase, hangs Francis Bicknell Carpenter’s First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln (1864; fig. 1.1). At nine feet tall and fifteen feet wide, the painting depicts a larger-than-life Lincoln surrounded by his war cabinet as the president reads the first draft of the historic document. Carpenter considered emancipation to be “an act unparalleled for moral grandeur in the history of mankind”; Lincoln, according to the painter, declared the Emancipation Proclamation “the central act of [his] administration, and the great event of the nineteenth century.”1 To record the moment, Carpenter spent six months at work in the White House, interviewing his subjects, sketching studies of the persons and things found in the painting, and composing what he hoped to be the pinnacle of his professional career.

Perhaps ironically, we remember Carpenter more for his memoir, Six Months at the White House with Abraham Lincoln (1866), than for his work as a painter of historical subjects or even as a portrait artist. The memoir, a rare inside look at the Lincoln presidency less than a year before his assassination, offers a hagiographic portrait of the president, one that continues to influence assessments of the man’s moral worth. In Carpenter’s memoir Lincoln emerges as tragically burdened by the demands of history, but not so much that he can’t let out the occasional guffaw; Lincoln is attentive to a diversity of opinion but unwavering in his core convictions and unflappable in the face of political intrigue; he is privately religious and unfailingly kind, even to strangers. Lincoln epitomizes the great moral cause of equality for all.

Carpenter achieves his task by deploying a rhetorical strategy that has its painterly analog, but that is more properly considered linguistic: the literary blazon, the verbal cataloging of a subject’s physical features to reveal his inner moral worth. Lincoln possessed a “gaunt but sinewy” frame in Carpenter’s estimation and was “inclined to stoop when he walked”; his “head was full medium size, with a broad brow, surmounted by rough, unmanageable hair”; and his “complexion was inclined to sallowness”—hardly a flattering portrayal. At the same time, Lincoln’s mouth was “expressive of much firmness and gentleness of character,” and his “eyes were blueish-gray in color,—always in deep shadow, however, from the upper lids, which were unusually heavy, (reminding me, in this respect, of [Gilbert] Stuart’s portrait of Washington,)—and the expression was remarkably pensive and tender, often inexpressibly sad, as if the reservoir of tears lay very near the surface.”2 In this early example of a rendering that merges traditionally feminine and masculine traits, Carpenter insists that Lincoln’s physiognomy replicates his personality, so that tenderness and sadness and firm resolution irrepressibly show themselves on the president’s features. In literature as in heraldry, the blazon testifies to the subject’s purity of bloodline, and in this curious revision of the “blood will out” cliché, Carpenter even suggests, although Washington had no direct descendants, a lineage connecting the nation’s two greatest presidents. What genealogy cannot furnish, art readily supplies.

In the passage immediately preceding this blazon, Carpenter explains the painting’s second most prominent still-life object (after the Emancipation Proclamation draft): a depiction of the “Map Showing the Distribution of the Slave Population of the Southern States” (1861) created by the U.S. Coast Survey.3 Carpenter writes: “Visitors to the Executive Chamber, during the administration of Mr. Lincoln, will remember the lithographic map, showing the slave population of the Southern States in graduated light and shade, which usually leaned against the leg of his desk or table, and bore the marks of much service. The States and counties most abounding in slaves were indicated on this map by degrees of blackness, so that by a glance the proportion of whites and blacks in the different States at the commencement of the Rebellion could be easily comprehended.”4

The map (fig. 1.2) shows a county-by-county, graduated image of slave density in the South in ten-point increments: a white county has a slave population of less than 10 percent, a light gray county has a slave population of 10 to 20 percent, and so on, until the darkest counties indicate a slave population, according to the “Scale of Shade” key, of “80 per ct. & upwards.” Beneath a county’s name is printed the proportion of slaves in its population; Amelia County, Virginia, just west of Richmond, for example, has a slave population of 72.6 percent, resulting in a near-black hue that requires white lettering for the label to be visible. On the bottom center of the map, a table shows the free population, slave population, total population, and percentage of slaves of each southern state. On the bottom left is certification of the map’s accuracy by Joseph C. G. Kennedy, superintendent of the census.

As he worked on this section of the painting, Carpenter borrowed the map without informing Lincoln, who later discovered it in the painter’s makeshift State Dining Room studio: “One afternoon the President came in alone, as was his wont,—the observation of the daily progress of the picture appearing to afford him a species of recreation. Presently his eye fell upon the map, leaning against a chair, as I had left it after making the study. ‘Ah!’ said he, ‘you have appropriated my map, have you? I have been looking all around for it.’ And with that he put on his spectacles, and, taking it up, walked to the window; and sitting down upon a trunk began to pore over it very earnestly.” According to Carpenter’s anecdote, Lincoln deployed the map as an instrument of wartime intelligence: the Commander in Chief studied its gradations to determine the likelihood that the so-called Kilpatrick-Dahlgren Raid of Union cavalry into Virginia might yield wartime spoils in the form of emancipated slaves. “It is just as I thought it was,” the president inferred, “He is close upon ––– County, where the slaves are the thickest. Now we ought to get a ‘heap’ of them, when [Gen. H. Judson Kilpatrick] returns.”5 (The botched raid badly misfired when Confederate troops killed Colonel Ulric Dahlgren and found on his body documents revealing a scandalous plan to torch Richmond and to assassinate Jefferson Davis.)

The historian Susan Schulten has pointed out that the map’s aesthetic features serve still other purposes: “Its minimalism and absence of decoration and color suggests neutrality and transparency: it appears simply to translate population data into graphic form.” The sheer force of social-scientific truth telling, Schulten adds, masks the map’s ideological underpinnings. The “very decision to map the relationship between slaves and the general population reflects a belief that slavery was behind the rebellion. And . . . the map enabled Lincoln to follow the progress of his military, which after January 1863 had officially become an army of liberation.”6 Seen in this light, the map of southern slavery fits perfectly into Carpenter’s larger project to define Lincoln as a martyr for freedom’s cause, as the Great Emancipator.

We have no reason to doubt that the Coast Survey map allowed Lincoln to unite military strategy with moral imperative, that it symbolized the war’s grand cause of human justice. That the map was so popular in the North—and explicitly “sold for the benefit of the sick and wounded soldiers of the U.S. Army,” according to its heading—reinforces the idea that the twin goals of military victory and abolition were inseparable. The four slave states that remained loyal to the Union, and that were not subject to the Emancipation Proclamation, complicate but do not diminish this understanding of the Coast Survey map.

Even his contemporaneous detractors knew Lincoln to be a shrewd and pragmatic politician, one quick to avail himself as necessary of the hard-knock politics of bureaucratic machinery. The map’s very existence, according to Schulten, stemmed from Lincoln’s desire for compensated emancipation.7 During the first two years of the Civil War, right up to January 1, 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order emancipating southern slaves “upon military necessity,” took effect, Lincoln pressed for gradual, compensated emancipation, a gesture meant to retain the loyalty of the four border states and to encourage the peaceful return of Confederate states to the Union.8 Such an approach would require geographic precision because Lincoln, a conservative Constitutionalist, believed that each state must arrive individually at a negotiated settlement to free its slaves.

The map very likely allowed Lincoln to see quickly the regional economics of such compensation, which would surely require a large overall price tag. As the historian Eric Foner notes, slaves at the start of the Civil War, when considered only for their monetary value, “exceeded the combined worth of all the banks, railroads, and factories in the United States”; they represented America’s single greatest asset at the time.9 The table at the bottom of the map would yield statewide figures, indicating that Virginia, because it had the largest number of slaves, required the greatest compensation; the map itself would further specify that the counties nearest Richmond, the darkest on this part of the map, would prove most expensive to compensate.

For both political and economic reasons, Lincoln hoped to convince the border states to agree first to gradual, compensated emancipation. It is in these loyal jurisdictions that the abolitionist cause might have taken hold more easily than in the deep South, and the small number of slaves there would prove relatively inexpensive to liberate in this transactional way. In a March 6, 1862, message to Congress, Lincoln urged legislators to provide incentives to states to agree to compensated emancipation as “one of the most efficient means of self-preservation” of the Union. He presented the effort as a simple matter of arithmetic: “In the mere financial, or pecuniary view, any member of Congress, with the census-tables and Treasury-reports before him, can readily see for himself how very soon the current expenditures for this war would purchase, at fair valuation, all the slaves named in any State.”10

In a follow-up letter sent eight days later to Senator James A. McDougall of California, Lincoln included a ledger detailing the slave population in each border state; at a rate of $400 per person, freeing the 1,798 slaves of Delaware would require $719,200, “less than one half-day’s cost of this war.” Freeing all of the border state and District of Columbia slaves would cost $173,048,800, slightly less than eighty-seven days of war expenses. Lincoln then asks, “Do you doubt that taking the initiatory steps on the part of those states and this District, would shorten the war more than eighty-seven days, and thus be an actual saving of the war expense?”11 Throughout that summer and into the fall of 1862, Lincoln pressed border state legislatures and the Congress to push ahead with gradual, compensated emancipation; even with an offer of financial compensation, a delayed implementation of twenty years or more, and a guarantee that the federal government would not interfere with the right of individual states to allow chattel slavery, not a single state legislature, and very few slaveholders in Washington, D.C., took up Lincoln’s piecemeal offer.

Even after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect in 1863, when plans for a gradual, compensated transition no longer applied, Lincoln may have viewed the Coast Survey map as something beyond a tool of military intelligence, moral stimulus, or financial accounting. In fact, the map may well have had a more sinister effect when judged by today’s standards. Revisionist scholars have long seen Lincoln as less than saintly; indeed, the historian George M. Fredrickson’s assessment leans heavily on the ambivalence toward Lincoln of W. E. B. Du Bois, who supplies the title to Big Enough to Be Inconsistent (2008), and of Frederick Douglass, whose nuanced appraisal concludes the slender volume. Before describing Douglass’s genuine appreciation of the martyr for Emancipation, Fredrickson shares the former slave’s more skeptical understanding of Lincoln, who stood, in Douglass’s words, “ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of this country.”12 Lincoln often viewed slaves as abstract “problems” not in the Du Boisian sense, but rather as glitches in the political system, and the Coast Survey map assists anyone who wishes to view slavery in the abstract, as data points rendered with visual elegance.

The language of geospatial data analysis—its brute simplicity, its tendency to strip away all competing information in favor of a single spectrum of knowledge—suggests another “problem” in Lincoln’s Coast Survey map. The racialized subjects represented by the map had yet to achieve full citizenship, even in Lincoln’s estimation; their density in parts of the South, especially along the great corridor of the Mississippi Delta, symbolized a grave threat to the Union. When Lincoln appraised military efforts in light of geospatial demography, he saw “slaves” and (according to Carpenter at least) “heaps” of wartime bounty, not the free-thinking individualist portrayed by Douglass, not the slave become a man.13

Much of Douglass’s and Du Bois’s and eventually Fredrickson’s ambivalence toward Lincoln stems from the president’s scheme to colonize newly emancipated slaves in Africa, Haiti, or Central America, an effort born of political expediency and perhaps an unreconstructed worldview. As Lincoln framed the issue for a “committee of colored men” gathered at the White House in late 1862, colonization represented the only avenue for African American political, economic, and social self-determination. In the United States, the president offered, biological differences create too high a hurdle for racial equality: “We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think your race suffer very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence.”14 Seen from this condescending vantage, the dark ink that depicts slave density in the Coast Survey map looks like a deep fissure tearing the Union in two. As the central artery of the national body politic, the Mississippi River should unite North and South, not split them apart. Healing the nation would require colonization.

As someone who cut his political teeth in Illinois, arguably the most racist state in the antebellum North,15 Lincoln did not require census data or the Coast Survey map to arrive at negative, racialist opinions about African Americans. Still, census data during the antebellum period skew toward the disenfranchisement embedded in the Constitution’s Three-Fifths Compromise. Following the language in Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution, censuses prior to 1850 enumerated for the purposes of representation and direct taxation “all free Persons . . . excluding Indians not taxed” and added to these “three fifths of all other Persons.” The first census schedule of 1790 thus lists “Free white Males” and “Free white Females,” “All other free persons” (used to designate free persons of color), and “Slaves.” The same data, with minor variations in age ranges, were collected and reported through the 1840 census.

Beginning in 1820, the census schedule called for the enumeration of “Free Colored Persons,” the closest approximation to the identity that we now label African American. Marshals entrusted with gathering the results were given no instructions on how to distinguish between slaves and free colored persons; census reports are equally silent about the distinction. Marshals were required to interview heads of households; in theory, these would include both slaveholders, who would report on the slaves in their possession, as well as free colored persons, who would report on their families. As a practical matter, the results were so lopsided that the latter category hardly registers in early compilations of the U.S. population. In 1820, for example, there were 233,524 free colored persons and 1,538,038 slaves, a sevenfold difference.

In a move with profound implications for modern racial demography and identity, the 1850 census schedule, which Congress specifically wrote into the legislation authorizing the census that year, introduced a new category for “color,” and within this category it offered the options “white,” “black,” or “mulatto.” These racial markers had been in popular use for centuries, but prior to 1850 they had never guided the formation of U.S. government policy. A sinister motive, one that would play out for most of the next century, lies behind this move toward a more complex racial taxonomy: as the political scientist Melissa Nobles demonstrates, policymakers collected the data because they wished to prove the racial degeneracy of free blacks and especially the mulatto progeny of racial mixture.16 Social scientists required definitive statistics to demonstrate, as they believed, that mulatto offspring had higher mortality rates than “pure” whites or blacks; by showing a dwindling mulatto population, they determined to prove, statistically, the “fact” of interracial degeneracy.

The official recognition of mulatto identity thus derives from a pseudoscientific belief that the mixed offspring of “pure” races are more susceptible to disease and less likely to reproduce than “pure-blooded” blacks or whites. Gathering data about mulattoes would demonstrate with statistical precision the theory of racial degeneracy. Yet any “scientific” data garnered from the new census category might serve competing ideological ends; that is, abolitionists might demonstrate the cruelty and deformity of slavery using the same data that slavery’s apologists might use to verify white supremacy. Perhaps to steer clear of political controversy, the census report for 1850 simply distinguished between “Free colored” (the number rose to 434,495) and “Slaves” (3,204,313).

The 1860 census, which obtained the data represented in the Coast Survey map, instructs enumerators for the first time, if only vaguely, how to reach racial designations in their work: “Under heading 6, entitled ‘Color,’ in all cases where the person is white leave the space blank; in all cases where the person is black without admixture insert the letter ‘B;’ if a mulatto, or of mixed blood, write ‘M;’ if an Indian, write ‘Ind.’ It is very desirable to have these directions carefully observed.” The instructions divulge a crucial piece of census history: until the late twentieth century, census enumerators, rather than the person counted, assumed responsibility for assigning racial identity on census schedules. The instructions posit race or “color” as a given—one simply is “white” or “black” or “mulatto” or “Indian”—but as we will see in the following section, the contextual cues for reading a person as white or black play a critical role in the labeling process.

The census of 1860 proved a watershed for yet another reason: for the first time, census officials released detailed, county- and city-level data about the color of the population. That is, data about the number of whites, blacks, and mulattoes, collected since 1850, figured prominently in the census report for 1860. In fact, several pages of the introduction to the Eighth Census are given over to a discussion of the “future increase of the African race in this country.” Within this discussion, which is startlingly accurate in its prediction of the African American population through the year 1900 (though less impressive when it comes to overall U.S. population forecasts), we find tacitly racist statistical reasoning and patently racist moralizing. Addressing the “declension of the free people of color,” the report identifies as causes “their greater indifference as a class to virtuous moral restraint” and the “unfavorable moral condition” that results. The census report goes on to point out, without identifying direct demographic evidence, “that corruption of morals progresses with greater admixture of races,” and predicts the “gradual extinction of that [free colored] people.” To be mulatto, the report concludes, is “more unfavorable to vitality, than a condition of slavery”; like the vanishing Indian before him, the mulatto faces “rapid absorption and extinction” in the swift progress of U.S. social change.17 An entire class of the population, the predominantly mulatto free persons of color, an invention of the U.S. legal system, is thus dismissed as morally and physically wanting, as diseased and doomed to perish.

The earliest geostatistical maps served epidemiological ends, allowing scientists to track the spread of disease and in so doing to pinpoint their source of origin and to mitigate negative outcomes. This epidemiological line of thinking—seeing spatial evidence for a problem to be eradicated—may well have informed Lincoln’s assessment of the Coast Survey map. If so, he was guided in this direction by the mapmakers. The map’s execution was not only seemingly neutral and transparent in its visual design; it was also strategically selective in its use of data. Just as epidemiological maps gain instructive power by filtering out needless data—today we call this “noise”—the Coast Survey sifted through mountains of available demographic information to present a compelling case about southern slave density. That is, the map does not present racial distribution (except indirectly and imprecisely), nor does it offer evidence of the geographic extent of blacks versus mulattoes versus whites. In fact, to arrive at its statistical results, the Coast Survey map actually omits the South’s entire population of free persons of color: they simply are not there.

If we deploy census data to look more closely at the example of Amelia County, Virginia, we discover that the slave population accounted for 71.3 percent of the county population rather than the 72.6 percent depicted on the map. That’s because Amelia County’s free colored population of 189 (55 blacks and 134 mulattoes) was not used in the Coast Survey’s calculations; rather, the mapmakers measured the county’s 7,655 slaves (5,914 blacks and 1,741 mulattoes) against its 2,897 whites. In Amelia County, dubious statistical practices yield only small differences in the final, slightly skewed results. Elsewhere, however, the Coast Survey’s narrow aim distorted results far more dramatically. In coastal Accomack County, Virginia, situated between the Atlantic Ocean and Douglass’s cherished Chesapeake Bay, 3,418 free colored persons, fully 18.4 percent of the county population, were left out of the Coast Survey’s calculation. The map shows a slave population of 29.6 percent, but in reality, when we account for the missing free colored persons, the figure stood at 24.2 percent. Not one of Virginia’s free colored persons is represented in the Coast Survey map. It’s as if 58,042 Virginians vanished into the ether, or migrated to a far-off colony. For the purposes of the map, that is precisely what occurred.

Jean Toomer, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Other Purebred Mulattoes (1870–1930)

With their 2011 edition of Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates Jr. unleashed a small storm by concluding, “based upon an analysis of archival evidence previously overlooked by other scholars, that Jean Toomer—for all his pioneering theorizing about what today we might call a multi-cultural or mixed-raced ancestry—was a Negro who decided to pass for white.”18 The controversy spilled over into the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education, where Byrd and Gates repeated the charge of passing, and into the New York Times, which quotes Gates as saying, “Everyone on his family tree was black and didn’t claim to be anything else. Only Jean tried to cross over.”19

Cultural historians have long associated Toomer with the U.S. census, a link that began innocently enough when George Hutchinson pointed out in 1991 that “both [Georgia Douglas Johnson] and Toomer could remember a period in which racial definition in Washington society was less rigid, less distinctly bifurcated into ‘black’ and ‘white’ worlds, than it had become by 1920, the last year in which the ‘mulatto’ designation was included in the U.S. census.”20 What appears to be the fleeting reference to a happy coincidence has in fact a far more jaded source. To expand on his point about the mulatto census category, Hutchinson cites Joel Williamson’s New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (1980). In that assertive social history, Williamson points out that the “census of 1920 was the last count of mulattoes made in the United States,” and from this Williamson concludes that “insofar as the Bureau of the Census was concerned, all Negroes did look alike.”21

Williamson’s conspiratorial tone has since crescendoed, finding its way into studies of Toomer that see the Census Bureau’s unbending agenda as antithetical to Toomer’s polyethnic “New Americanism.” In his Dialect of Modernism (1994), for example, Michael North argues that the withered options on post-1920 census schedules “may have made the choice of racial allegiance for someone like Toomer a good deal starker” than before. Discussing the collage aesthetic in Cane, and again citing Williamson, Rachel Farebrother subsequently offered that the disappearance of “mulatto” from census racial categories “reflects a shift from recognition of biracial and interracial identity to the complete segregation of the population according to the one drop rule, which was accompanied by the rigid enforcement of racial difference through Jim Crow laws. Toomer was fully aware of the hardening racial boundaries.” Against this winnowing conformity to a black/white racial binary, Farebrother asserts, Toomer’s avant-garde poetry and prose proposes instead “a liquefaction and softening of racial boundaries,” a rendering of the racial order that defies bureaucratic compartmentalization.22

This brings us back to Byrd and Gates, who, rather than take up Toomer’s shifting and sometimes contradictory statements about racial identity, instead scoured the public record for hard evidence about the Toomer family background and thus about Jean’s racial allegiance or disloyalty. To answer their “vital question”—“Was Jean Toomer a Negro who passed for white?”—Byrd and Gates pored over census records from 1850 to 1920 to determine that “Jean Toomer’s mother, father, grandfather, and grandmother all self-identified as Negroes.” Then they looked to the 1917 draft registry, which lists Toomer as Negro. Then it’s on to the 1920 census, which “shows Toomer boarding with other lodgers in the house of an Italian couple on East Ninth Street in Manhattan. He is assigned New York as a birthplace, suggesting that someone else responded on his behalf, in his absence. His race is listed as ‘white.’” On the 1930 census form, “Toomer is listed as a resident, with many others, at 11 Fifth Avenue, in Manhattan. Because of the accuracy of other data contained in this document—including his birthplace, his parents’ states of birth, and his occupation as a freelance writer—it is likely that he furnished these details himself. His race is listed as white.” A later draft registry identifies Toomer as Negro, but a marriage certificate lists Toomer and his wife, the writer Margery Latimer, as white.23

According to Byrd and Gates, “These documents reveal that Jean Toomer self-identified as Negro in 1917, when he first registered for the draft. Then either he or a roommate decided to identify him as ‘white’ in the federal census of 1920. Similarly, Toomer self-identified as ‘white’ in the 1930 census and a year later on his marriage license with Margery Latimer. . . . In the course of twenty-five years between his 1917 and 1942 army registrations, Toomer was endlessly deconstructing his Negro ancestry.”24 The inconsistencies, Byrd and Gates concluded, demonstrate Toomer’s unwillingness to commit to his true, ancestral racial heritage; instead, Toomer eagerly passes as white when given the chance. As if selecting from among the clichés offered by the tragic mulatto stereotype, Toomer chooses his wife’s racial identity over that of his parents and grandparents.

There are, however, a few glitches in Byrd and Gates’s analysis.

The first stems from a misunderstanding of census and draft registry policy and a subsequent misreading of census documents. Most important, we cannot attribute agency on the part of a person counted in a census enumeration, particularly with respect to racial identity. Before 1970, census enumerators were solely responsible for determining the racial identity of a person counted, and in most decades they were specifically instructed on how to reach such a determination. Very often the instructions governing one census were superseded by contradictory instructions for the following census. In 1920, for example, the instructions required the enumerator—not the person counted—to record “all Negroes of full blood” as “black” and to record “all Negroes having some proportion of white blood” as “mulatto.” In 1930, they were instructed to record as “Negro” any “person of mixed white and Negro blood . . . no matter how small the percentage of Negro blood.” These contrast sharply with the instructions for how to determine nationality or language use during the same censuses; these less visible data required the enumerator to ask specific questions of the person counted. The instructions for the 1870 census indicate just how fluid and contingent racial interpretation can be. That year, enumerators were instructed to “be particularly careful in reporting the class Mulatto. The word here is generic, and includes quadroons, octoroons, and all persons having any perceptible trace of African blood.” The instructions further emphasized that “important scientific results depend upon the correct determination of this class.”

With these instructions, the Census Bureau struck a balance between the language of subjective interpretation (“perceptible”) on the one hand, and popular notions of precise blood fraction (“quadroons, octoroons”) on the other hand. In other words, census enumerators determined “race” or “color” based largely on visual cues, but presumably also based on the enumerator’s subjective understanding of the wider circumstances in which data were collected. To assume that Toomer’s parents and grandparents “self-identified” as Negroes and that Toomer “self-identified as ‘white’” grossly misapplies the data found on the census schedules.

The same cannot be said of Toomer’s identification as Negro on his draft registration cards. In completing the 1917 draft registration, Toomer responded in his own hand to the simple question “Race (specify which)?” with “negro.” Beginning in 1918, draft cards provided respondents with a choice of racial categories, first “White / Negro / Indian,” and later “White / Negro / Oriental / Indian Citizen / Indian Non-Citizen.” Draft cards in 1942—the so-called Old Man’s Registration because the effort collected information about seasoned industrial workers rather than potential combatants—simply asked respondents to list their “race” without offering specific options.25 Put simply, the draft cards rather than the census schedules provide a clearer window into how Toomer racially identified himself to the federal bureaucracy.

A closer look at the census schedule for 1920 reveals additional errors of historical interpretation on the part of Byrd and Gates.26 Although Toomer shared a roof with “an Italian couple of East Ninth Street in Manhattan,” the pair were not his landlords; rather, they were among the fifty or so other lodgers at the corner of East Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue, just two blocks north of Washington Square Park. (The census schedule shows the address as 6/8 East Ninth Street.) The young Italians were Daniel Martin, a musician, and his wife, Marie, both immigrants to the United States in 1906. On the schedule, the Martins are listed first among a group that includes Toomer, but still other groups at this address can be found further up the page and on the next page; no one at this address is described as head of household, as we might expect of a resident landlord. Like Toomer, most of these lodgers are fairly young, with well over half in their twenties or thirties; most are U.S.-born, but over half are the second-generation children of immigrants. Those who are employed typically work in a skilled trade or in a clerical profession: there are two stenographers, two translators, two medical students, and eight salespersons, including Toomer, whose occupation is listed as “salesman” and whose place of work is listed as “grocery.”

All of the residents at 6/8 East Ninth Street are identified as “white”; in fact, of the one hundred persons counted by this census enumerator, Frank B. Guest, on January 21 and 22, 1920, every single person is listed as white. The sheer preponderance of those who appeared white at this and nearby addresses—including the lawyer and future New York Supreme Court justice Samuel Seabury and the writer Alleyne Ireland—would incline Guest to assume that the olive-skinned Toomer was also “white,” whether or not Guest interviewed Toomer in person. In a densely populated area such as Manhattan, residential segregation no doubt guided enumerators’ decisions. Indeed, out of all 1,034 persons who lived in Toomer’s census tract (Manhattan CT 59) in 1920, only three (0.3 percent) were Negro males and eleven (1.1 percent) were Negro females. (The Census Bureau did not report a distinction between “black” and “mulatto” at the census tract level.)

The 1930 census yields similar data about the contextual cues that would incline the enumerator, Franklin Howard, to record Toomer as “white” when he visited 11 Fifth Avenue and four additional apartment buildings on April 29, 1930. Howard collected data about roughly a hundred people on that Wednesday, almost all of whom are listed as white. Two of them, both servants on East Tenth Street, are listed as “Neg.” for “Negro.” Out of the 2,652 people who lived in Manhattan CT 59 in 1930, just five (0.2 percent) were Negro males and 13 (0.5 percent) were Negro females. The fifty or so people who shared an address with Toomer were mostly born in the United States, although a large number, nearly half, were second-generation Americans. These “guests” at 11 Fifth Avenue tend to represent the professions, with an architect, two attorneys, and a physician joining an artist (Alexandre Sach de Paris, a Romanian-born painter) and six writers, including Toomer, whose profession is listed as “writer” and his industry as “free lancer.” Once again, the enumerator would likely assume that Toomer, like everyone else at 11 Fifth Avenue, was white.

It makes perfect sense that a writer such as Toomer, whose work underscores racial fluidity and who in vignettes from Cane such as “Fern” and “Bona and Paul” even brings up the difficulties of interpreting racial identity, would inspire critics to see him as somehow betrayed by the Census Bureau when it dropped the “mulatto” category after 1920. It also makes some sense that Byrd and Gates, whose prolific careers saw them emerge as authorities on African American literary culture, would want to authenticate, however uncomfortably, Toomer’s racial background. But both camps are equally guilty of still another historiographical error: the sin of omission.

That Toomer was a grocer (he worked for New York’s Acker, Merrall & Condit Co.) rarely enters into discussions of his life and career. An obsession with how the census places Toomer into one or another racial category also ignores the unique feel of his Greenwich Village environment and downplays the sociological dimension of his existence. Never more than 350 feet from the headquarters of the avant-garde journal Broom, housed in the basement of a brownstone owned by his future wife, Marjorie Content, Toomer was continually surrounded by first- and second-generation Americans who fit the upwardly mobile profile popularized by Horatio Alger and Mary Antin.

That Toomer shared a roof with so many writers in 1930 has also gone unreported. The writers include Harold P. Davis, a journalist originally from Maine; Montague Glass, the Anglo-Jewish creator of the Potash and Perlmutter characters; the Tennessee-born novelist Charles B. Parmer; and Philip G. Wylie, the science fiction writer whose best-selling novel Gladiator (1930) later inspired the Superman comic books. Another writer listed at the same address, just above Toomer on the schedule (which suggests that they lived in adjacent apartments), is the mysterious Nels Jargenson, the divorced son of a Denmark native and a World War I veteran. Jargenson’s occupation and employer are the same as Toomer’s (writer / free lancer), but there exists no evidence of his life in print except perhaps as “Nels Jorgenson,” a minor fictional character in Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man (1934). The clustering of so many writers at one single location is not unusual, and in fact Toomer’s neighborhood had previously been home to Mark Twain and Willa Cather, among many others; writers and artists no doubt cherished the cosmopolitan feel of the cafes at the Hotel Brevoort and the Hotel Lafayette, located less than a block from Toomer’s doorstep.

The explosive population growth in this small part of Manhattan (from 1,034 in 1920 to 2,652 in 1930) was driven almost entirely by a surge in the number of native-born whites, who account for 1,409 of the census tract’s 1,618 new residents during this time (table 1.1). As these data reveal, Toomer’s neighborhood of choice was increasingly white and decreasingly immigrant during the decade when Harlem came to be identified as the “Negro Metropolis.” At the turn of the century, the immigrant enclaves west and south of Washington Square encroached on the pricier homes north of the square, including Toomer’s apartments; as the social historian Caroline F. Ware somewhat crassly put it, “the substantial, middle-class complexion of the ‘American Ward’ was rudely destroyed by the erection of tenements . . . encircling, invading, and finally overrunning the Village in the closing years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth.”27 This “encircling” and “invading” is better characterized as an ebb and flow, one that depended on wider economic patterns.

TABLE 1.1. Manhattan census tract 59 population, 1920–1930

Census Category	1920	1930	Growth Rate
White Male (native-born)	346 (33.5%)	1,028 (38.8%)	297.1%
White Male (foreign-born)	80 (7.7%)	279 (10.5%)	348.8%
Negro Male	3 (0.3%)	5 (0.2%)	166.7%
Other Male	3 (0.3%)	7 (0.3%)	233.3%
White Female (native-born)	388 (37.5%)	1,115 (42.0%)	287.4%
White Female (foreign-born)	203 (19.6%)	203 (7.7%)	100.0%
Negro Female	11 (1.0%)	13 (0.5%)	118.2%
Other Female	0 (0.0%)	2 (0.1%)	n/a

Source: Minnesota Population Center, National Historical Geographic Information System: Version 2.0. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2011.

During the boom years of the 1920s, a gentrifying mix of real estate speculation and high rents brought to the Village a new crop of twentieth-century bohemians and pretenders who found nearby tenements quaint and who associated ethnic diversity with radical ideas about art and politics. In fact, because the rehabilitation of older buildings into luxury apartments was bounded in upper Manhattan by Negro Harlem, an influx of real estate capital poured into Greenwich Village redevelopment projects after World War I—a full $18 million between 1920 and 1930 alone.28 Jean Toomer was one among many Villagers lured there by the charm and romance of its recent past, along with the latest in fashionable creature comforts.

It might be said that my splitting hairs with Toomer scholars owes much to the influence of W. E. B. Du Bois. Fresh off the publication of his groundbreaking study The Philadelphia Negro (1899), Du Bois, at the same time that he was working on The Souls of Black Folk (1903), set out to systematize the empirical study of the African American population. From his position in the Atlanta University sociology department, Du Bois carried out an ambitious program, practically inventing the field of Negro sociology with scores of conferences, seminars, field studies, statistical analyses, and publications for academic and lay audiences. As he put it in an address to Boston’s Twentieth Century Club, Atlanta University was at the time “the single American institution of learning that is making systematic and conscientious study of the American Negro.”29 Because he had grappled with the problem firsthand, Du Bois understood well the importance of gathering solid data, information that could be trusted and compared across historical and geographic divides. He sought publicly and behind the scenes to make the U.S. census the key instrument for furthering what we now call African American studies.

Du Bois explained his reasoning and outlined a broad research program in his Southern Workman essay “The Twelfth Census and the Negro Problems” (1900). The research plan was to take place within a three-tiered institutional framework. The primary data collection would occur during the decennial census, and Du Bois indicated that “special pains should be taken to count and classify returns as to Negroes somewhat minutely and elaborately in a special census volume.” The data would be handed off to a “Special Committee for the Study of the Negro Problems” composed of distinguished scholars and civic leaders, both black and white; this group would then “have general oversight of a series of social studies into the condition of the American Negro.”30

With a proposed budget of up to $500,000, the group would outsource research questions to diverse teams of social scientists, and the committee would ultimately determine the scope and shape of public reports. Du Bois’s grand blueprint never came into being; however, the Census Bureau was already undertaking a similar effort, spearheaded by a Cornell University statistician, Walter F. Wilcox, and published as Negroes in the United States (1904). Wilcox, who later introduced his Cornell student Jessie Redmon Fauset to Du Bois, commissioned Du Bois in late 1902 to write one the volume’s entries, “The Negro Farmer.” Negroes in the United States would serve as the benchmark and model for similar studies published by the Census Bureau in 1915, 1916, and 1932; together these volumes underpin the emergence of African Americans as an object of statistical inquiry and the rise of African American studies as an academic discipline.

Although Negroes in the United States doesn’t explore African American society at quite the level of depth envisioned by Du Bois, it nevertheless presents a comprehensive look at the subject. In “The Twelfth Census,” Du Bois calls for examinations of 1) occupations and wages, 2) land, property, and taxation, 3) education, 4) crime and punishment, and 5) the right of suffrage. Negroes in the United States takes up the first three items to some extent, and paints the most complete demographic picture of the subject up to that time.31 Perhaps as important for our contemporary understanding of African American identity, Wilcox’s approach conforms entirely with Du Bois’s stipulation in “The Twelfth Census” that “pains should be taken to count the Negro population thoroughly; to class those of African descent together and not to confound with them groups socially so diverse as the Japanese and Indians, to have especial care taken with the age classifications and the statistics of conjugal condition where large errors creep in among the Negro statistics for obvious reasons.”32 Each of these aspects of Du Boisian methodology deserves attention, but for the present I wish to focus on the first: the classification of all persons of African descent under a single banner, whether this be “black folk” or, as Du Bois more often put it, “Negroes.”33

Throughout Negroes in the United States, Wilcox considers the reliability of his data. For example, he points out that “when [the enumerator] classifies by observation alone (and it must be borne in mind that he usually sees personally only a small portion, perhaps not more than one-fifth, of the persons about whom he reports), he must judge some families to be negro that are really white and some to be white that are really negro”; most of the errors, he continues, will be of the latter sort, the mistaking of Negroes for white. Seen in this light, some measure of bureaucratic “passing” seems unavoidable. On the specific question of intraracial color distinctions he sides squarely with Du Bois. Although Wilcox dutifully reports data on the number of mulattoes, he dismisses the number’s accuracy. For one thing, the “percents of mulattoes to all negroes in some states differ so widely from census to census as to cast grave doubts upon the results.” When it comes to the tortured congressional requirements placed on the 1890 census, Wilcox observes that “no competent authority will claim that a census can obtain trustworthy information regarding the intermixture of the two races in the detail in which it was called for by the law of 1889.”34 But Wilcox has little doubt concerning the ontological value of the mixed-race category: in his view, there exists a species of American known as the mulatto, and the census confirms that between one-ninth and one-sixth of all Negroes in the continental U.S. deserve the label.

Du Bois, on the other hand, tended to deploy the concept of the mulatto rhetorically, even when the veneer of demography reinforced the potency of his message. In Souls, for example, he decries the “two millions of mulattoes” who testify to the sexual violence perpetrated against female slaves.35 Here Du Bois cares more about the magnitude than the specificity of the tally. In subsequent years he would point to the elaborate West Indian racial caste system as a means to discredit the political philosophy of Marcus Garvey. (Du Bois held that Garvey was blinded by a fixation on intraracial color difference.) In his role as foundational social scientist, however, Du Bois rarely even mentions intraracial color difference, and he never makes a distinction between blacks and mulattoes the basis of social analysis. The problem of the previous century, he put forward, was the problem of the color line, singular. In 1930, the U.S. census recorded Du Bois as a “Negro” for the first time in his life; prior to that point, he had been counted among the “mulatto” population. But throughout his career, including his early career as an activist scholar, Du Bois insisted that the civil rights agenda required intraracial solidarity and interracial cooperation.

Du Bois and Wilcox were entirely correct to distrust mixed-race census data, which emerged from a pseudoscientific belief in interracial degeneracy. Although racist social scientists hoped to demonstrate that mulatto offspring were less healthy and less likely to reproduce than their racially “pure” parents, the facts as they actually emerged told another story: the proportion of mulattoes among the overall Negro population grew from 11.2 percent in 1850 to 13.2 percent in 1860, fell slightly to 12.0 percent in 1870, and rose again to 15.2 percent in 1890. (Although enumerators were instructed to collect data concerning the mulatto population in 1880, the Census Bureau did not report figures for that year.)

The pseudoscientific efforts to collect mulatto population data, led by people like the Massachusetts physician Edward Jarvis and the Alabama physician Josiah Nott, reached their apex with the 1890 census, which advised enumerators to “be particularly careful to distinguish between blacks, mulattoes, quadroons, and octoroons.” The instructions further clarified that the “word ‘black’ should be used to describe those persons who have three-fourths or more black blood; ‘mulatto,’ those persons who have from three-eighths to five-eighths black blood; ‘quadroon,’ those persons who have one-fourth black blood; and ‘octoroon,’ those persons who have one-eighth or any trace of black blood.” Partly because the Census Board distrusted the mixed-race data gathered in 1890—and partly because Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) rendered subtle racial distinctions largely moot within the context of American social relations—the “mulatto” category disappeared from the 1900 census. Subsequently, race statisticians, Census Bureau officials, and their congressional allies struggled to restore the “mulatto” category in 1910 and 1920.36 Beyond 1920, the category disappeared altogether from census schedules and from enumerator instructions, although since 1970 several thousand individuals have self-identified as mulatto on their census forms.

Simply considering the racial categories available on census schedules doesn’t go far enough to indicate fully how shifting and contingent bureaucratic identity labels can be; we must keep in mind as well that census enumerators were charged with interpreting the racial identity of the individuals they counted until 1970, when respondents first self-selected their racial identity.37 As we see with the 1890 census, the instructions’ vastness and variety pose inherent interpretive difficulties. The instructions in 1910 identify as “black” “all persons who are evidently full-blooded negroes” and as “mulatto” “all other persons having some proportion or perceptible trace of negro blood.” Adding to the potential confusion, in 1930 and 1940 the instructions included lengthy and elaborate explanations for how to consider Negro–Indian hybrids. The 1930 instructions put it this way: “A person of mixed Indian and Negro blood should be returned a Negro, unless the Indian blood predominates and the status as an Indian is generally accepted in the community.” The language of interpretive discretion—“distinguish,” “evidently,” “perceptible,” “generally accepted”—simultaneously presumes the objective truth of a dubious ontological proposition (the existence of “pure-blooded” whites, Indians, or Negroes) and leaves much room for variation and human error.

In a study titled Negro Population, 1790–1915 (1918), the Census Bureau acknowledged that “perceptibility [of racial difference] is dependent upon the ability of the enumerator to perceive, and this ability varies from enumerator to enumerator.”38 Indeed, the Census Bureau admitted in 1921 that the previous year’s census left “considerable uncertainty” regarding the “classification of Negroes as black and mulatto,” given that the distinction was left to “the judgment and care employed by the enumerators.”39 It turns out that the racial identity of the enumerator played a role in determining the racial background of the person counted. In 1928, the Census Bureau reported that it was giving up on the distinction between “black” and “mulatto” partly because “it was suggested that the increase in the percentage mulatto shown by the 1910 census [over the 1890 census] was probably the result of the employment of large numbers of Negro enumerators and that this might explain the decrease in the percentage mulatto between 1910 and 1920,” since there were fewer Negro enumerators in 1920 than 1910.40 In other words, “Negro” enumerators were more likely than “white” enumerators to identify the same person as “mulatto” rather than as “black.” Negro enumerators, apparently, saw race more often as a widely varied spectrum and indicated “mulatto” identity with greater frequency—just how much greater frequency is unknown. (The Census Bureau makes no mention of mulatto enumerators in its self-assessment.) Racial identity, as we frequently see in fiction, is in the eye of the beholder.

The parallel cultural myth, that a Negro can better tell than a white person when a fellow “Negro” is passing as “white,” appears to have some basis in census history. Whether or not social science confirms cultural mythology, this much is certainly true: Census Bureau practices, though cloaked in the aura of statistical truth, are conditioned by cultural practices.41 The Census Bureau would not think to count the number of “blacks” or “mulattoes” if the culture did not already posit the existence of such creatures; for that matter, the Census Bureau would not think to count a person as “white” if “whiteness” were not already offered by the culture as an objective fact. The census thus defines social reality and conditions cultural practices at the same time that it is conditioned and defined by them. Du Bois knew well that social reality mirrored cultural practices, but as an agenda-driven social scientist he also understood that the civil rights cause required clarity of vision. Toomer, by contrast, felt under no obligation to make life easy for cultural historians with a sociological bent. The best that we can do now to honor the range of possibility supplied by both Harlem Renaissance figures is to understand that the tactical or accidental use of identity labels is governed by an intricate web of historical, legal, and social pressures. No one simply is this or that race or ethnicity; we are made into ourselves and we can remake ourselves within limits.

The Pre-Postracial President and the Politics of Racial Self-identification (1940–2010)

The twentieth century saw four important census trends that bear directly on this study. First, the census validated the social-scientific approach to race and ethnicity, even while noted cultural anthropologists and well-known creative writers discredited the supposed biological basis of racial difference. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, presidential administrations began appointing census directors based on their long and distinguished track records in the statistical sciences, although political patronage continued to play a role with a few appointments. Since 1950, every Census Bureau director has had an extensive research background; most have been highly regarded academics, and a few had backgrounds in corporate or think-tank research. Even when a director lacked a background in statistics or economics, he or she relied heavily on the bureau’s increasingly professionalized staff. In this sense, the evolution of the Census Bureau mirrored the professionalization of the academy.

The continual effort to perfect enumeration, statistical sampling, and social analysis within the Census Bureau and among those who deploy its data sidesteps ontological questions (Who is “white”? What does “Negro” mean?) and places attention instead on less labyrinthine issues that boost short-term policy analysis (What was the undercount among rural Hispanic males? What is the mean level of educational attainment among urban African American women between ages 25 and 34?). This is precisely the effect that Du Bois and Wilcox sought to achieve: the most accurate possible count of America’s widely accepted racial groups. Because the post-Depression era welfare state relies on census data for the allocation of resources, social advocacy and civil rights organizations reacted predictably.

Second, civil rights organizations began leveraging the scientific imprimatur of the census at the same time that they actively lobbied to bring Census Bureau practices in line with a civil rights agenda. For example, the very first number of The Crisis (November 1910) quotes two references to census data in its “Opinion” page compilation, and the magazine cited census data repeatedly, as unimpeachable fact, during Du Bois’s tenure as editor.42 (There are even cases in which Du Bois cites the data that he compiled for Negroes in the United States.) National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) leadership maintained a steady correspondence with Census Bureau officials, perhaps none more than Charles E. Hall, who for decades served as the bureau’s Specialist in Negro Statistics and who was a leading Negro figure in Washington politics. Hall prepared the important Census Bureau compendium Negroes in the United States, 1920–32 (1935), a massive publication (845 pages) that grew out of the original, less exhaustive volume put together by Wilcox and Du Bois.43 (Hall’s study, it should be noted, dispenses with the “mulatto” category.)

Such lobbying has continued. In anticipation of the 2000 census, the NAACP convention of 1998 adopted a resolution launching a cooperative effort with the Census Bureau to achieve a thorough count of the African American population. In 2010, the NAACP undertook an extensive push—the Yes We Count Census Campaign—to publicize the importance of the census and to encourage full participation in the tally. Still other civil rights organizations, from the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) to the United Sikhs, have lobbied the Census Bureau to alter its racial and ethnic categories or to improve its outreach and enumeration methods.44

Third, and important for my argument about the Harlem Renaissance era, the shift toward racial self-identification in the 1960s has had profound sociocultural consequences. One outcome of this shift is that we can now assume census records to be reasonable approximations of individuals’ racial self-identity. At least once per decade, the census requires Americans to ponder which of the Census Bureau’s racial categories best fits their family background and present-day sensibility. Another outcome is that social advocacy and civil rights groups now lobby their own constituencies as well as Census Bureau officials. The NAACP gains clout if the nation possesses large numbers of persons who refer to themselves as something along the lines of “colored people”; LULAC represents a larger constituency if more Americans claim a “Latin American” background. Both groups invest precious resources to ensure that their constituencies participate fully in the decennial census; some of their leaders advocate for a pared-down self-reporting of racial identity based on the premise that a multiracial option might dilute political influence.

Fourth, racial self-identification in the U.S. census introduces an existential dimension to demography at the personal and social levels. Civil rights groups reflect upon their own names and sometimes fidget over how these measure up against the preferred tags of officialdom; these same organizations stress racial and ethnic group cohesion no matter how comfortably they fit within a bureaucratic nomenclature. At the individual level, racial self-identification turns out to be a ritual to test the strength of bonds between self and family, between the present and various genealogical pasts.

To some extent, all four of these trends played out when, on March 20, 2010, President Barack Obama filled out the census questionnaire at his Oval Office desk. The national media reported the event and located great significance in Obama’s choice: he marked “Black, African Am., or Negro.” The man who in Dreams from My Father (1995) reflects poignantly on the ironies and paradoxes of his mixed-race background—he describes himself alternately as “black” and “brown,” and he acknowledges that Americans often project “the mixed blood, the divided soul, the ghostly image of the tragic mulatto” onto his person—claimed a singular racial identity even though the census form allowed the option of checking multiple categories simultaneously.45

Public reaction to the president’s choice was swift and quite often severe. When the conservative columnist Abigail Thernstrom wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Obama’s choice effectively “disowned his white mother and, by extension, his maternal grandparents who acted as surrogate parents for much of his boyhood,” she—wittingly or not—deployed the tragic mulatto motif that more often serves liberal voices of racial authenticity. At the other end of the political spectrum, the legal scholar Patricia J. Williams saw the president’s choice as less from among myriad categories than one of being “black /non-black,” suggesting that African Americans have less room to racially self-fashion than other traditionally nonwhite persons. Seen in this light, Obama could only disavow his black father; any claim of whiteness on his part would sever his father’s branch from the family tree. It would mean disappearing in the hazy ether of a postracial society, a space that is purely theoretical to persons of African descent: “Most who appear phenotypically ‘black’ enjoy neither the privilege nor the inclination to play around on a government form designed to track and remediate generations of prejudice.”46 Both Thernstrom and Williams view choosing one or another racial category as irresponsible, either to one’s twining family tree or to one’s racial comrades. The responsibility, then, is either to the past or to the present (and future), not to both. Had Obama chosen otherwise on the census questionnaire, he would no doubt be lauded or vilified for yet another set of reasons.

We prefer to think of our presidents and poets as somehow transcending overly simple distinctions such as the ones posed on census forms. The writers of the Harlem Renaissance surely represent the humanist resistance to bureaucratic pigeonholing. And yet the retrospective diagnosis of the Harlem Renaissance as a narcissistic failure, popularized during the Black Arts era, gains in persuasive power when considered in light of the grim realities of a society that required brute oversimplification as a counterweight to plain old brutality. The following chapter brings us back to the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance, a moment when the social sciences began to understand individual psychology, individual character, as governed by predictable but hardly simplistic rules of behavior. Indeed, when we consider multiple facets of identity simultaneously, the game rapidly becomes complex indeed.