Kendrick Meek: “I stand to support the Mollohan- Shays amendment and the rule. Today I think this is a good rule. It permits the Census…”

“I stand to support the Mollohan- Shays amendment and the rule. Today I think this is a good rule. It permits the Census Bureau to continue planning for use of sampling. The census always fails, Mr. Speaker, to count some people, but the under count is always higher among blacks and minorities, and if my colleagues can look at these data here which show the last six censuses and the under count that occurred at that time, they will note here beginning in 1940 each census, in each census the under count for blacks was more than 3 percent larger than it was for the whites. The difference between the black undercount and the white undercount, Mr. Speaker, was greater, as you can see, in the 1990 census, which is here. In the 1990 census, 4.4 percent among blacks, more than any other census since the beginning of the count of the census. The 1990 census failed to count 1.4 million African-Americans. It also failed to count 2.6 million. So I am here to say to Members that this particular rule hopefully will support later on a greater accountability in our census. But the percentage of blacks that were not counted in 1990, 5.7 percent, was much larger than the percentage of whites not counted in 1990, which was 1.3 percent, as we can see from the chart.”