It sounds to me like what he is saying is that the Hawaii DOH would see a birth certificate that said “African” and then send it back to the hospital to have them change it to “Negro”. And he has examples, but were those parents born in the US?
And why would the NIHS need to tell their coders how to code the parents’ race, if all the DOHs were correcting the BCs to match the Federal tables? We know that Hawaii had their own set of codes, right? How would that figure into it?
The fed codes manual didn’t instruct the punchers on how to code the parents - just the children. By using the parents listed race(s).
The DOH (even at local levels) had to use universal codes for things like race, because the fed coders would reference that if there were any irregularities. In addition to penciling in the codes prior to microfilming, the local DOH would have to catch anomalies - like using “African” as a race. However, the local DOH seemed to have additional info that they were accustomed to harvest for their own use - such as parents business. The fed code manuals don’t touch on that at all.
In the ‘60s they were not all PC as they are now. We know that for a fact. They were trained to fill the forms a certain way for a certain reason. The fed code manual explains what to do if a BC showed up without enough data to make a clear decision on how to code the childs race. It can be expected that the same was true of local level instruction manuals.