Another Look at Margaret Sanger and Race

Courtesy of the Sophia Smith Collection

In a 1945 interview published in the Chicago Defender, Margaret Sanger said:

“Discrimination is a world-wide thing. It has to be opposed everywhere. That is why I feel the Negro’s plight here is linked with that of the oppressed around the globe. The big answer, as I see it, is the education of the white man. The white man is the problem. It is the same as with the Nazis. We must change the white attitudes. That is where it lies.”

Wait one minute! I thought that Margaret Sanger was a racist Nazi bent on exterminating African-Americans who hobnobbed with Hitler! That’s what the Internet says. Accusations like these, once found only among fringe groups, on blogs and homemade websites, have been moving increasingly into the mainstream media. As historians who have dedicated years to making Sanger’s papers easily accessible, readable, and understandable it is disheartening to see these ahistorical attacks.
One of the difficulties of exploring Sanger’s views on race is that much is made of a very small number of historical documents. Though she sought to expand access to birth control information to all women, not just African-Americans, Sanger’s efforts to reach poor African-American women in the South in the late 1930s have been held up as proof of her malign intent to exterminate black babies. (for details on the Negro Project see our Newsletter article “Birth Control or Race Control”) Sanger’s views on eugenics, where she supports the idea that those less fit should have smaller families, have been interpreted to refer specifically to African-Americans, despite her explicit statement that her use of the term “unfit” did not refer to specific races or religions, a position about which she said: “I frankly deplore.” (“Questionnaire,” Feb. 13, 1934, in Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, Volume 2, p. 277.) What we have found is that in the larger context of Sanger’s work, her work with African-American women doesn’t differ in any substantive way from the way that she worked with white women. But demonstrating this is not easy to fit into sound bites and Sanger left no documents that explicitly discussed issues of race.
Or did she? While searching the digital Historical African American Newspapers collection available through ProQuest, we came across the Chicago Defender interview. This short article contains possibly the most explicit comments about race and racism Sanger ever made. Published in the American Viewpoint column, the interview, entitled “On U.S. Birth and Bias Control” was 1945 conducted by Earl Conrad, a white journalist working in the Defender’s New York Bureau.
Conrad and Sanger discussed the problems facing American Negros as part of a broader world problem. “It is not just a Negro problem,” Sanger remarked, “Like the problems of the people of India, of minorities everywhere, it is a democratic problem. We have got to work all together on these issues.” She spoke of her trips to India and China, and said, “Knowing our own problem, it gave me greater sympathy with the others, with what I saw in the Orient. I can recall many horrible things I saw in India. I once saw a white man come out of a train; there were five or six Indians in his way; he just kicked them away–literally, with his foot. There were a hundred people around, who were powerless to strike him. The white man’s power and the Indian’s defenselessness were so unjust. “
In discussing birth control work among African-Americans, Sanger mused, “From the very beginning of birth control, there was the problem of approaching the Negro. Soon after I launched the campaign, a Harlem Methodist leader, who was most intelligent, questioned me about birth control. He was a brilliant speaker, and he had been thinking about it. Later a man named Harrison of the Urban League took up our idea.” In addition to Hubert Harrison, Sanger had the support of W.E.B. DuBois, and Rev. William Lloyd Imes in her efforts to open a Harlem branch of her downtown birth control clinic (for more on the Harlem branch, see Newsletter article “Looking Uptown”). Talking with Conrad in 1945, she mentioned that she felt that attitudes about African-Americans were slowly changing. “When we first started out an anti-Negro white man offered me $10,000 if I started in Harlem first. His idea was simply to cut down the number of Negroes. ‘Spread it as far as you can among them,’ he said. That is, of course, not our idea. I turned him down. But that is an example of how vicious some people can be about this thing.”
Conrad asked Sanger about her experiences regarding race in the South, during her many lectures there. “I remember addressing a colored church group once. I was staying with a white doctor at the time. They didn’t let a Negro doctor introduce me to the people. The white doctor had to do it. That was in Memphis. What hangs over the South is that the Negro has been in servitude. The white southerner is slow to forget this. His attitude is the archaic in this age. Supremacist thinking belongs in the museum.”
Sanger saw collaboration as the way to overcome racism. “One thing that is most helpful is to have people working together. When you have Negroes working with whites you have the breakdown of barriers, the beginning of progress. Negro groups must take the initiative, and not wait around for integration to come to them. They must get it themselves. The struggle for it will bring it. . . . Planned parenthood is not aimed at any one people. It is for all, and the objective is to do away with the waste of life. A sickly race is a weak race. As long as Negro mothers die in childbirth at two and one-half times the rate of white mothers, as long as Negro babies are dying at twice the rate of white babies, colored homes will be unhappy. Negro participation in planned parenthood means democratic participation in a democratic idea. Like other democratic ideas, planned parenthood places greater value on human life and the dignity of each person. Without planning at birth, the life of Negroes as a whole in a democratic world cannot be planned.” (Earl Conrad, “On U.S. Birth and Bias Control,” Chicago Defender, Sept. 22, 1945, 11, see our digital edition (currently in beta testing), Speeches and Articles of Margaret Sanger, 1911-1959 for a full transcription.)

бардак с наследниками Кинга

His wife accepted it on his behalf and read a speech which includes, "There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger's early efforts... Like all poor, negro and white, they have many unwanted children... This is a cruel evil they urgently need to control... We spend paltry sums for population planning, even though its spontaneous growth is an urgent threat to life on our planet."

наследники утверждают, что он этой речи не толкал, и всё это выдумка, хотя прошло уже более 40 лет, нет видимо и свидетелей: откуда взялась сама речь

MLK Day 2011

On Martin Luther King’s birthday, it’s worth remembering that among many other things, the late civil rights icon was a champion of reproductive justice. King received the inaugural Margaret Sanger Award from Planned Parenthood in 1966. Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, died four months after King’s acceptance of the award that bore her name.
Coretta Scott King accepted the prize on her husband’s behalf, and read a speech of his. It concluded:
…we are natural allies of those who seek to inject any form of planning in our society that enriches life and guarantees the right to exist in freedom and dignity.
For these constructive movements we are prepared to give our energies and consistent support; because in the need for family planning, Negro and white have a common bond; and together we can and should unite our strength for the wise preservation, not of races in general, but of the one race we all constitute — the human race.
Coretta added her own words about Sanger:
‘I am proud tonight to say a word in behalf of your mentor, and the person who symbolizes the ideas of this organization, Margaret Sanger. Because of her dedication, her deep convictions, and for her suffering for what she believed in, I would like to say that I am proud to be a woman tonight.”
And let’s be clear on our history: Planned Parenthood was passionately committed to abortion access long before Dr. King was honored. King would have known that by 1966, Planned Parenthood was headed by Alan Guttmacher, president of the organization from 1962-74 and a tireless and very public advocate for the right of women to terminate unwanted pregnancies.
Dr. King was not silent on the issue of abortion and birth control. His enthusiastic endorsement of Planned Parenthood and his praise for Margaret Sanger made clear his deep and passionate commitment to a full-range of reproductive services for everyone.
Remember that next time someone tries to remake Dr. King into a conservative.

речь Мартина Лютера Кинга 5 мая 1966

произнесена от его имени женой -- Кореттой Скотт Кинг (Coretta Scott King)
вместе с Кингом были награждены Линдон Джонсон, Карл Хартман и и генерал Уильям Дрейпер, мл. подробности мероприятия

Family Planning — A Special and Urgent Concern

by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Recently, the press has been filled with reports of sightings of flying saucers. While we need not give credence to these stories, they allow our imagination to speculate on how visitors from outer space would judge us. I am afraid they would be stupefied at our conduct. They would observe that for death planning we spend billions to create engines and strategies for war. They would also observe that we spend millions to prevent death by disease and other causes. Finally they would observe that we spend paltry sums for population planning, even though its spontaneous growth is an urgent threat to life on our planet. Our visitors from outer space could be forgiven if they reported home that our planet is inhabited by a race of insane men whose future is bleak and uncertain.
There is no human circumstance more tragic than the persisting existence of a harmful condition for which a remedy is readily available. Family planning, to relate population to world resources, is possible, practical and necessary. Unlike plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases we do not yet understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess.
What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the solution but universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and education of the billions who are its victims.
It is easier for a Negro to understand a social paradox because he has lived so long with evils that could be eradicated but were perpetuated by indifference or ignorance. The Negro finally had to devise unique methods to deal with his problem, and perhaps the measure of success he is realizing can be an inspiration to others coping with tenacious social problems.
In our struggle for equality we were confronted with the reality that many millions of people were essentially ignorant of our conditions or refused to face unpleasant truths. The hard-core bigot was merely one of our adversaries. The millions who were blind to our plight had to be compelled to face the social evil their indifference permitted to flourish.
After centuries of relative silence and enforced acceptance, we adapted a technique of exposing the problem by direct and dramatic methods. We had confidence that when we awakened the nation to the immorality and evil of inequality, there would be an upsurge of conscience followed by remedial action.
We knew that there were solutions and that the majority of the nation were ready for them. Yet we also knew that the existence of solutions would not automatically operate to alter conditions. We had to organize, not only arguments, but people in the millions for action. Finally we had to be prepared to accept all the consequences involved in dramatizing our grievances in the unique style we had devised.
There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger's early efforts. She, like we, saw the horrifying conditions of ghetto life. Like we, she knew that all of society is poisoned by cancerous slums. Like we, she was a direct actionist — a nonviolent resister. She was willing to accept scorn and abuse until the truth she saw was revealed to the millions. At the turn of the century she went into the slums and set up a birth control clinic, and for this deed she went to jail because she was violating an unjust law. Yet the years have justified her actions. She launched a movement which is obeying a higher law to preserve human life under humane conditions. Margaret Sanger had to commit what was then called a crime in order to enrich humanity, and today we honor her courage and vision; for without them there would have been no beginning. Our sure beginning in the struggle for equality by nonviolent direct action may not have been so resolute without the tradition established by Margaret Sanger and people like her. Negroes have no mere academic nor ordinary interest in family planning. They have a special and urgent concern.
Recently the subject of Negro family life has received extensive attention. Unfortunately, studies have overemphasized the problem of the Negro male ego and almost entirely ignored the most serious element — Negro migration. During the past half century Negroes have migrated on a massive scale, transplanting millions from rural communities to crammed urban ghettoes. In their migration, as with all migrants, they carried with them the folkways of the countryside into an inhospitable city slum. The size of family that may have been appropriate and tolerable on a manually cultivated farm was carried over to the jammed streets of the ghetto. In all respects Negroes were atomized, neglected and discriminated against. Yet, the worst omission was the absence of institutions to acclimate them to their new environment. Margaret Sanger, who offered an important institutional remedy, was unfortunately ignored by social and political leaders in this period. In consequence, Negro folkways in family size persisted. The problem was compounded when unrestrained exploitation and discrimination accented the bewilderment of the newcomer, and high rates of illegitimacy and fragile family relationships resulted.
For the Negro, therefore, intelligent guides of family planning are a profoundly important ingredient in his quest for security and a decent life. There are mountainous obstacles still separating Negroes from a normal existence. Yet one element in stabilizing his life would be an understanding of and easy access to the means to develop a family related in size to his community environment and to the income potential he can command.
This is not to suggest that the Negro will solve all his problems through Planned Parenthood. His problems are far more complex, encompassing economic security, education, freedom from discrimination, decent housing and access to culture. Yet if family planning is sensible it can facilitate or at least not be an obstacle to the solution of the many profound problems that plague him.
The Negro constitutes half the poor of the nation. Like all poor, Negro and white, they have many unwanted children. This is a cruel evil they urgently need to control. There is scarcely anything more tragic in human life than a child who is not wanted. That which should be a blessing becomes a curse for parent and child. There is nothing inherent in the Negro mentality which creates this condition. Their poverty causes it. When Negroes have been able to ascend economically, statistics reveal they plan their families with even greater care than whites. Negroes of higher economic and educational status actually have fewer children than white families in the same circumstances.
Some commentators point out that with present birth rates it will not be long before Negroes are a majority in many of the major cities of the nation. As a consequence, they can be expected to take political control, and many people are apprehensive at this prospect. Negroes do not seek political control by this means. They seek only what they are entitled to and do not wish for domination purchased at the cost of human misery. Negroes were once bred by slave owners to be sold as merchandise. They do not welcome any solution which involves population breeding as a weapon. They are instinctively sympathetic to all who offer methods that will improve their lives and offer them fair opportunity to develop and advance as all other people in our society.
For these reasons we are natural allies of those who seek to inject any form of planning in our society that enriches life and guarantees the right to exist in freedom and dignity.
For these constructive movements we are prepared to give our energies and consistent support; because in the need for family planning, Negro and white have a common bond; and together we can and should unite our strength for the wise preservation, not of races in general, but of the one race we all constitute — the human race.

---

Margaret Sanger was too ill to attend the award ceremony in May 1966. She died the following September. Mrs. Sanger would have been deeply honored and pleased to have heard such beautiful tributes from kindred heroes in the struggle for equality and civil rights, Dr. and Mrs. Martin Luther King Jr.
About two weeks after the award ceremony, Dr. King wrote the following letter to Cass Canfield, chairman of the Executive Committee of the PPFA — World Population Emergency Campaign:

Dear Mr. Canfield:
Words are inadequate for me to say how honored I was to be the recipient of the Margaret Sanger Award. This award will remain among my most cherished possessions. While I cannot claim to be worthy of such a signal honor, I can assure you that I accept it with deep humility and sincere gratitude. Such a wonderful expression of support is of inestimable value for the continuance of my humble efforts.
Again let me say how much I regret that at the last minute urgent developments in the civil rights movement made it impossible for me to be in Washington to personally receive the award. My wife brought glowing echoes of the wonderful reception and impressiveness of the total occasion.
I am happy to be the recipient of the Margaret Sanger Award and I can assure you that this distinct honor will cause me to work even harder for a reign of justice and a rule of love all over our nation.
Sincerely yours,
Martin Luther King Jr.

Feminists for Choice Explore Issues of Sanger and Race

Нашёл проект сэнгеровских бумаг на wordpress'е


On the Feminists for Choice blog, Serena Freewomyn posted “Was Margaret Sanger a Racist?” The post offers a quick look at a topic much in the blogosphere, and while we don’t entirely agree with the author’s analysis, it at least adds some context to the debate .  The comments posted on the article are just as interesting as the blog itself.
In the interest of adding to the conversation, we’d like to provide a bit more information about Sanger and the Negro Project.
The Negro Project was an attempt to empower the black community to rise out of poverty through the use of birth control. The project was widely supported by black leaders, including Mary McLeod Bethune, W. E. B. DuBois, and Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.

Sanger proposed this project because she wanted to help  “a group notoriously underprivileged and handicapped to a large measure by a ‘caste’ system that operates as an added weight upon their efforts to get a fair share of the better things in life. To give them the means of helping themselves is perhaps the richest gift of all. We believe birth control knowledge brought to this group, is the most direct, constructive aid that can be given them to improve their immediate situation.”
- Margaret Sanger to Mary Lasker on July 10, 1939. [Source]

Sanger was targeting the black community because, at the time, most of that community was at a disadvantage. The racism that wove through American history made it consistently more difficult for people of color to get ahead was the ‘caste’ system that left the black community, “notoriously underprivileged and handicapped”  according to Sanger. In conceiving this project Sanger wasn’t trying to use birth control as a means of getting rid of people of color; instead, she wanted the Negro Project to give a marginalized community power over their bodies and the ability to decide how many children to have. This would, in turn, make it easier for them to provide for themselves and get ahead.
Furthermore, Sanger did not enter the project without first observing a desire for reproductive health information from black women in the communities that she intended to work within.
Hazel Moore, a veteran lobbyist and health administrator, ran a birth control project under Sanger’s direction and found that black women in several Virginia counties were very responsive to birth control education. A 1938 trip to Tennessee further convinced Sanger of the desire of African-Americans in that region to control their fertility and the need for specific programs in birth control education aimed at the black community.
After observing this need Sanger teamed up with the Birth Control Federation of America to get funding for a campaign that would teach Southern black women about contraception. Unfortunately once they secured funding the project left Sanger’s control. She had wanted to train a black minister and a black doctor to tour the South, preaching about contraception in every city, church, and organization that they could. She believed that this step was necessary to drum up support and gain the community’s trust before launching a practical campaign that would actually supply contraception to black mothers.
The men running the Birth Control Federation of America decided that they wanted to go a different route, to include working birth control services for the black community into the general public health program, without any prior education in the community. They also refused Sanger’s idea to build a black-staffed clinic within the community, choosing instead a more mobile plan that swept in and out of the area like the vaccination caravans of the time.
The Negro Project was fairly problematic  because, as devised, it centralized control in the hands of white physicians, which did not empower the black community. It is important to note that this was not Sanger’s vision, this is what happened after her input in the project was ignored and her influence taken away.
Margaret Sanger’s papers make it clear that she wanted to develop a project that would empower black community leaders to bring contraception options and education to the people of their own communities. It’s unfortunate that she lost control of the project and it did not become what she had envisioned. It is also unfortunate that her efforts on behalf of people of color and other impoverished mothers have been turned into an example of some evil plot by writers who do not take the time to understand Sanger’s intentions.

ещё про негритянский проект 

'Glenn Beck': Segregation in the 20th Century

Over 100,000 Japanese-Americans alone were forced into camps called war relocation camps. It sounds pleasant. Can we go?
There were separate camps for German-American citizens to relocate.
OK. So, we got that. Oh, and here's science.
You have Margaret Sanger. Science lauded by the left for her family planning. Evil! Read her words. Evil!
She was an open proponent of eugenics, who wrote something to a congressman called in 1932, "a plan for peace," in which she proposed keeping the doors of immigration closed to all of those who would be detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as the feeble-minded idiots, morons, insane, criminal and others.
She advocated abortions to stop from creating socially undesirable people. Oh! Who were they?
You see how the forces are beginning to move? The government, segregating. Commerce, segregating. Science, breed, the perfect race.

надо почитать повнимательнее

Бернард Шоу поддерживал Гитлера

George Bernard Shaw, “ I don’t want to punish anybody, but there are an extraordinary number of people who I might want to kill…I think it would be a good thing to make everybody come before a properly appointed board just as he might come before the income tax commissioner and say every 5 years or every 7 years…just put them there and say , ‘Sir or madam will you be kind enough to justify your existence…if you’re not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little bit more then clearly we cannot use the big organization of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive. Because your life does not benefit us and it can’t be of very much use to yourself.’

Shaw wrote, “ I appeal to the chemists to discover a humane gas that will kill instantly and painlessly. In short- a gentlemanly gas deadly by all means, but humane, not cruel.”

Interviewed on Germany Shaw declared:
“Germany’s contention of ‘race pollution’ was ‘despicably unscientific.’” But he said he “appreciated” Hitler’s political sagacity and the courage with which he has rescued Germany from the gutter,, and placed her once more at the head of Central Europe.”
( SOURCE: GEORGE BERNARD SHAW Approaches His 82d Birthday Anemic But Still Vociferously Aware of His OwnJJnique. Significance, Galveston Daily News: 7/24/1938)

It is important to note that George Bernard Shaw was a Eugenicist who supported Planned Parenthood Founder, and eugenicist Margaret Sanger and others in the eugenics movement.

What many people do not know is that Shaw was a contributor to Planned Parenthood Founder, Margaret Sanger’s “Birth Control Review”.

Shaw endorsed Sanger, Birth Control, and EUGENICS..

In the June 1929 Birth Control Review, George Bernard Shaw supports Sanger’s efforts to promote birth control when he, ” We are up against an overpopulation problem created by Capitalism…Socialists say quite truly that Socialism can get rid of it…But it cannot wait for Socialism…”

In Margaret Sanger’s Autobiography, Sanger writes, ” Jane had lnvited literary luminaries and their wives George Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett, Sir Arbuthnot Lane, Professor E W MacBride of the Eugenics Education Society, Walter Salter of the League of Nations, and Lord Buckmaster.

“It had been my experience that personages gave little of themselves on formal occasions So many people expected these lions to roar bravely, forgetting that they preferred to save their sparkling sallies for the pages of their books.”

Sanger continues, “I was back In New York by the end of October, and soon came a letter from Shaw cheering me w~th his point of view.”

Sanger reads the letter from George Bernard Shaw and says Shaw compares the “more evolved people” or “White Elitists” to “lower classes who need to be taught to control their populations calling them “amoeba” ,

‘ Birth control should be advocated for its own sake, on the general
ground that the difference between voluntary, irrational, uncontrolled activity IS the difference between an amoeba and a man, and if we really belleve that the more highly evolved creature is the better we may as well act accordingly. As the amoeba does not understand birth control, it cannot abuse it, and therefore its state may be the more
gracious, but it is also true that as the amoeba cannot write, it cannot commit forgery yet we teach everybody to write unhesitatingly, knowing that if we refuse to teach anything that could be abused we should never teach anything at all .’

Margaret Sanger Autobiography Pages 371-372

At the end of this post is a preview for the film: Maafa21, and if you order this movie and watch all 2 hours of it, you will also learn who helped fund the Nazi’s, develop the gas they used in their concentration camps, and fund the development of the abortion pill RU-486 – for the purpose of population control. And how they had ties to Planned Parenthood Founder, Margaret Sanger.

источник

соревнование 2х систем

Джозеф Хейн РЕЙНИ

Joseph Hayne RAINEY (1832 ≈ 2.8.1887),

бывший раб, первый негр, избранный в Палату представителей Конгресса США (1870≈79).

Lecture to the Ku Klux Klan

из автобиографии (любопытно: читает робот)

needed services

Margaret Sanger made statements on eugenics nearly a century ago that were wrong and are
completely unacceptable. They have never represented the values of Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood's mission is to provide preventive health care to everyone — in every community — regardless of their race, ethnicity,sex, religion, sexual orientation, or ability to pay.

Planned Parenthood provides needed services

Pro-life adopts racism

Cynthia Tucker: Pro-life groups adopt 'racism'

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Perhaps members of the anti-abortion movement are growing a bit desperate. Though they’ve managed to crimp women’s reproductive rights through decades of legislative maneuvering and extra-legal harassment, they still cannot overturn Roe v. Wade, the historic 1973 Supreme Court decision. Nor have they moved public opinion much: A majority of Americans still believe that current law should stand.

Perhaps that’s why some factions in the “pro-life” crusade are professing a newfound concern for the well-being of black children. Perhaps that’s why “racism” has become the battle cry of anti-abortion groups whose members like to think that racism no longer exists.

Georgia’s largest anti-abortion group, Georgia Right to Life, is presenting itself as the last line of defense against a widespread plot to wipe out black people — a pogrom of sorts. The group has mounted billboards throughout black Atlanta neighborhoods, claiming that “Black children are an endangered species” because of abortions.

While anti-abortion activists have long derided Margaret Sanger, considered the mother of modern family planning, for her endorsement of eugenics, they have more recently taken aim at such mainstream organizations as the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, claiming it, too, is run by bigots. Two years ago, a faith-based group with ties to black clergy sent a letter to the Congressional Black Caucus denouncing Planned Parenthood for its “racist and eugenic goals.”

If conservatives are sincere about curbing abortions — among all women: white, black and brown — they should support efforts to broaden women’s health care, which includes reproductive health care. Easy access to contraceptives would encourage their use, thereby reducing unintended pregnancies — and abortions.

“The health disparities for low-income women and women of color are enormous,” noted Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood, which provides full-service reproductive health care — including non- controversial procedures such as annual pelvic exams — to women who cannot get it elsewhere.

But social and religious conservatives have been fighting health care reform, which would broaden access to reproductive health care, with the passion they normally reserve for bashing Roe v. Wade. That’s why it’s hard to believe they really care about black women — or their children.

Cynthia Tucker is a Washington-based columnist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Black Genocide

Anti-Choice Campaign Aims to Undermine Support for Reproductive Rights by Falsely Claiming 'Black Genocide'

By Michelle Goldberg, Religion Dispatches
Posted on March 16, 2010, Printed on March 20, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/146044/

For several years now, the religious right has been trying to appropriate the moral authority of the Civil Rights Movement. It’s an audacious strategy, given that Christian conservative politics were forged in the white Southern backlash to school integration. But it’s had some successes, particularly in rousing black churches against the gay rights movement. Now, the anti-abortion movement is making a push to enlist African Americans in their cause by framing abortion as a tool of eugenics and genocide.
The campaign is already having an impact. As the New York Times reported late last month, the overwhelmingly white Georgia Right to Life has spent more than $20,000 erecting 80 billboards around Atlanta that proclaim, “Black children are an endangered species.” The group has created a Web site, Too Many Aborted, with excellent production values, designed to portray legal abortion as a plot against the black community. Meanwhile, according to the Times, the new documentary Maafa 21: Black Genocide in 21st Century America, which purports to “trace connections among slavery, Nazi-style eugenics, birth control and abortion,” is finding an audience among black organizations nationwide. The Times quoted Markita Eddy, a sophomore at the historically black Morris Brown College, who had turned against abortion rights after seeing the film.
As propaganda, Maafa 21 is fairly ingenious, incorporating just enough truth to provide a surface plausibility. The word “Maafa” is a Swahili term to describe the period of black enslavement. In the film, narrator Markus Lloyd argues that the Maafa “did not end when the slaves were freed... a hidden racial agenda is keeping the Maafa alive into the 21st century.” That sounds true enough, though Lloyd isn’t talking about poverty, or educational disparities, or the legacy of Jim Crow—he’s talking about family planning and abortion rights.
What follows is a highly selective, distorted history of the reproductive rights movement. To be sure, that movement has some dark corners, and not everything in Maafa 21, which was directed by the white Texas anti-abortion activist Mark Crutcher, is untrue. Overall, though, it’s an exceedingly dishonest propaganda exercise, one that aims to convince African Americans that both family planning and evolutionary theory are part of a massive conspiracy against them.
There’s no denying that Margaret Sanger, the heroine of the American birth control movement, made alliances with eugenicists and eventually adopted some of their rhetoric; her oeuvre is full of language that sounds shocking to modern ears. Maafa 21 quotes from a letter in which she wrote of the need for a “simple, cheap, safe contraceptive to be used in poverty-stricken slums, jungles, and among the most ignorant people. I believe that now, immediately there should be national sterilization for certain dysgenic types of our population who are being encouraged to breed and would die out were the government not feeding them.”
These words are noxious, but it’s also important to put them in context. As Sanger’s biographer, the historian Ellen Chesler, has written, in the 1920s (when Sanger’s career took off), eugenics “had become a popular craze in this country—promoted in newspapers and magazines as a kind of secular religion... The great majority of American colleges and universities introduced formal courses in the subject, and sociologists who embraced it took on what one historian has called a ‘priestly role.’”
Both supporters and opponents of birth control deployed eugenic arguments, and there were unregenerate racists on both sides. Debating Sanger, one Catholic bishop argued that “the races from northern Europe,” who he called “the finest type of people” needed to have at least four children per family to avoid “extinction.” Maafa 21 includes ugly quotes from the eugenicist Charles Davenport, but doesn’t mention that he opposed birth control. Later, we see an image of Hitler and the words “Natural Allies.” Naturally, the movie doesn’t mention that, upon gaining power, Hitler, eager for more German babies, moved quickly against legal abortion and birth control clinics.
Meanwhile Sanger, for all her flaws, was no racist. Yes, she wanted to curb the reproduction of the mentally “unfit,” a noxious idea. But contrary to what Maafa 21 claims, she didn’t target African Americans—she believed that intelligence and ability varied among individuals rather than among ethnic groups. One of her ardent supporters was W.E.B. DuBois, who echoed her eugenic ideas. As Chesler wrote, DuBois “condemned what he called ‘the fallacy of numbers’ and deemed the ‘quality’ of the black race more important to its survival.” When Sanger opened a clinic in Harlem in 1930, it “was endorsed by the powerful local black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, and by established political and religious leaders in Harlem,” wrote Chesler. Sanger was even invited to address Harlem’s largest Baptist church.
Maafa 21 moves from distortion to outright deception in its treatment of Gunnar Myrdal, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who, with his wife, Alva Myrdal, championed family planning and pioneered Sweden’s social democracy. In the film, Connie Eller, who is identified only as a “St. Louis community organizer,” but who is actually the founder of Missouri Blacks For Life, discusses Myrdal’s 1944 book An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. Myrdal, says Eller, “believed that not only could blacks not help themselves, he felt that nobody could help them, and the only solution in his eyes was to get rid of them.”
This is an outrageous distortion. Myrdal was initially commissioned to undertake a large-scale study of race in America by the Carnegie Corporation, whose leaders wanted the fresh eyes of a foreigner. He was horrified by segregation and by the conditions African Americans were forced to endure. He concluded that racism was a “problem in the heart of the American,” one that pitted the American creed of freedom and equality against American reality. An American Dilemma was an anti-racist opus; it was cited in the Brown v. the Board of Education decision; one of Myrdal’s collaborators on the project was Ralph Bunche, who later worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr. in the Civil Rights Movement. Maafa 21 quotes descriptions of the mindsets of white racists in a way that implies that they’re Myrdal’s own views. It’s an ugly trick, and a mendacious one.
There are, of course, very good reasons for minorities to be suspicious of population control. Black people have indeed been subject to involuntary sterilization and reproductive coercion. Maafa 21 recapitulates anti-contraception arguments made by male Black Power leaders in the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, African-American militants were behind some of the earliest instances of clinic violence. As Elaine Tyler May writes in her forthcoming book, America and the The Pill (Basic Books, April 27, 2010), one Cleveland family planning center was burned down after accusations of “black genocide,” while in Pittsburgh, the militant leader William “Bouie” Haden threatened to firebomb a clinic.
And yet African-American women have always favored family planning by wide margins. “Many in the Black liberation movement rejected their brother’s charge to them to bear more children,” wrote Dorothy Roberts in Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty. She quotes Toni Cade’s 1970 essay “The Pill: Birth Control or Liberation?”: “I’ve been made aware of the national call to Sisters to abandon birth control... to picket family-planning centers and abortion-referral groups and to raise revolutionaries,” she wrote. “What plans do you have for the care of me and my child?”
Martin Luther King Jr., it’s important to point out, was a champion of family planning. Indeed, in 1966, King won Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger award. His wife, Coretta Scott King, delivered his acceptance speech on his behalf. “There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger's early efforts,” said King, adding:

She, like we, saw the horrifying conditions of ghetto life. Like we, she knew that all of society is poisoned by cancerous slums. Like we, she was a direct actionist—a nonviolent resister… At the turn of the century she went into the slums and set up a birth control clinic, and for this deed she went to jail because she was violating an unjust law. Yet the years have justified her actions. She launched a movement which is obeying a higher law to preserve human life under humane conditions… Our sure beginning in the struggle for equality by nonviolent direct action may not have been so resolute without the tradition established by Margaret Sanger and people like her.

Like others trying to turn abortion into a racial wedge issue, Crutcher, the director of Maafa 21, points out that black women have a far higher abortion rate than white women. He’s right that this is a result of discrimination, though not in the way he believes. Thanks in part to the anti-abortion movement, poor women have far inferior access to sex education and reproductive health services than middle class women do. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 69% of pregnancies among African-American women are unplanned, compared to 40% for white women. This is an injustice, because black women deserve the same control over their reproductive lives that white women enjoy.
Opponents of abortion would like to set themselves against the most callous eugenicists, but in fact the two sides have a lot in common: both see women as incapable of making their own choices, and so resort to coercion.
Michelle Goldberg, a contributing editor for Religion Dispatches, is the author of The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World (Penguin, 2009), and the New York Times bestseller Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism.

© 2010 Religion Dispatches All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/146044/

Maafa 21

creates a highly selective, distorted history of the reproductive rights movement and frames abortion as a tool of eugenics and genocide.

As propaganda, Maafa 21 is fairly ingenious, incorporating just enough truth to provide a surface plausibility. The word “Maafa” is a Swahili term to describe the period of black enslavement. In the film, narrator Markus Lloyd argues that the Maafa “did not end when the slaves were freed... a hidden racial agenda is keeping the Maafa alive into the 21st century.” That sounds true enough, though Lloyd isn’t talking about poverty, or educational disparities, or the legacy of Jim Crow—he’s talking about family planning and abortion rights.

Законы Джима Кроу (англ. Jim Crow laws) — неофициальное широко распространённое название законов о расовой сегрегации в некоторых штатах США в период 1890—1964 годов.

it’s an exceedingly dishonest propaganda exercise, one that aims to convince African Americans that both family planning and evolutionary theory are part of a massive conspiracy against them.

Debating Sanger, one Catholic bishop argued that “the races from northern Europe,” who he called “the finest type of people” needed to have at least four children per family to avoid “extinction.” Maafa 21 includes ugly quotes from the eugenicist Charles Davenport, but doesn’t mention that he opposed birth control. Later, we see an image of Hitler and the words “Natural Allies.” Naturally, the movie doesn’t mention that, upon gaining power, Hitler, eager for more German babies, moved quickly against legal abortion and birth control clinics.

Sanger believed that intelligence and ability varied among individuals rather than among ethnic groups. One of her ardent supporters was W.E.B. DuBois, who echoed her eugenic ideas. As Chesler wrote, DuBois “condemned what he called ‘the fallacy of numbers’ and deemed the ‘quality’ of the black race more important to its survival.” When Sanger opened a clinic in Harlem in 1930, it “was endorsed by the powerful local black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, and by established political and religious leaders in Harlem,” wrote Chesler. Sanger was even invited to address Harlem’s largest Baptist church.

There are, of course, very good reasons for minorities to be suspicious of population control. Black people have indeed been subject to involuntary sterilization and reproductive coercion. Maafa 21 recapitulates anti-contraception arguments made by male Black Power leaders in the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, African-American militants were behind some of the earliest instances of clinic violence. As Elaine Tyler May writes in her forthcoming book, America and the The Pill (Basic Books, April 27, 2010), one Cleveland family planning center was burned down after accusations of “black genocide,” while in Pittsburgh, the militant leader William “Bouie” Haden threatened to firebomb a clinic.

Martin Luther King Jr., it’s important to point out, was a champion of family planning. Indeed, in 1966, King won Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger award. His wife, Coretta Scott King, delivered his acceptance speech on his behalf. “There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger's early efforts,” said King, adding:

She, like we, saw the horrifying conditions of ghetto life. Like we, she knew that all of society is poisoned by cancerous slums. Like we, she was a direct actionist—a nonviolent resister… At the turn of the century she went into the slums and set up a birth control clinic, and for this deed she went to jail because she was violating an unjust law. Yet the years have justified her actions. She launched a movement which is obeying a higher law to preserve human life under humane conditions… Our sure beginning in the struggle for equality by nonviolent direct action may not have been so resolute without the tradition established by Margaret Sanger and people like her.

Like others trying to turn abortion into a racial wedge issue, Crutcher, the director of Maafa 21, points out that black women have a far higher abortion rate than white women. He’s right that this is a result of discrimination, though not in the way he believes. Thanks in part to the anti-abortion movement, poor women have far inferior access to sex education and reproductive health services than middle class women do. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 69% of pregnancies among African-American women are unplanned, compared to 40% for white women. This is an injustice, because black women deserve the same control over their reproductive lives that white women enjoy.

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Reproductive justice for all

вменяемая статья, даром, что Гардиан
истерия расистских абортов впечатляет :(

If African-American women have more abortions it is not down to a conspiracy but because basic needs are not being met

• 
• 
  
  • Latoya Peterson
  • guardian.co.uk, Friday 5 March 2010 10.30 GMT
  • Article history

Anti-abortion activists have found a new weapon to wield in the war on choice: drawing comparisons between black abortion rates and cultural genocide. However, their claims distort the truth.
As the New York Times reports, in recent years, anti-abortion organisations have changed tactics, now specifically targeting African Americans. While black women make up less than 10% of the US population, we account for more than a third of the demand for abortion services. Now, organisations like Georgia Right to Life have decided to spend more money on minority outreach, taking the fight to colleges and churches, and peddling the message that black women are being swept up in a large scale conspiracy to eliminate black people. The Times points out:

"A new documentary, written and directed by Mark Crutcher, a white abortion opponent in Denton, Texas, meticulously traces what it says are connections among slavery, Nazi-style eugenics, birth control and abortion, and is being regularly screened by black organisations."

The ideas propagated by the pro-life movement are based in some truths. Margaret Sanger, a major birth control advocate who shepherded the founding of birth control clinics was a staunch advocate of eugenics, the belief that selective breeding could eliminate undesirables from society. On her list were racial minorities, those in poverty, the mentally ill and disabled people. While Sanger was against abortion, she was in favour of forced sterilisation and segregation. (Her Scottish counterpart, Marie Stopes, was also a proponent of eugenics and believed sterilisation should be compulsory for what she termed "unfit" parents.)
However, anti-choice protesters seem to forget that the women seeking abortions are doing so voluntarily, for many different reasons. If black women have a disproportionately high number of abortions, it is not because of a grandiose conspiracy theory, but that the basic needs of women in our society are not being met. Additionally, many women of colour have begun organising outside of the pro-choice/pro-life framework, looking instead to a solution based in reproductive justice. The idea behind the reproductive justice movement isn't simply abortion rights, but a multitude of other issues. As activist Kimala Price explains:

"Reproductive justice is not just about the individualistic right to have an abortion (ie, the right not to have children) but to include the right to have children and to raise them in healthy and stable families. Accordingly, these activists have broadened reproductive rights and freedom beyond abortion rights, the rights to privacy and "choice" which are normally associated with the movement. In sum, reproductive justice encompasses many other issues such as economic justice, immigration rights, housing rights, and access to healthcare."

Loretta Ross, current national director and one of the founding members of SisterSong – the women of colour reproductive justice collective – has tackled this issue often, revealing that black women have been on the frontlines of the reproductive justice debates for years, and actively advocated for birth control. When it was discovered that large numbers of black women were dying from illegal, back alley abortions, our community organised to earn the right for a safe way to terminate pregnancies. As Ross writes in her definitive piece on African American Women and Abortion (pdf):

"Despite the fact that much of the decline in the fertility rates of African Americans since the civil war resulted from the activism and determined choices of African-American women, our contributions to the birth control and abortion movements in the United States have been obscured by racist and sexist assumptions about us, our sexuality, and our fertility. Distilling fact from myth is difficult because so many accounts of African-American and women's history are written from perspectives that fail to acknowledge our impact. This omission distorts the contemporary views of African-American women about the reproductive freedom movement and our ownership of it."

And there are dozens of other issues involved in why women make the choices they do, far more than the mainstream anti-abortion movement prefers to acknowledge. Miriam Perez, a radical doula and Latina activist discusses how healthcare and access change the discussions on "choice" for the women she works with:

"These days, the abuses are less obvious and more insidious. When I worked with pregnant Latina immigrants in Pennsylvania, I saw their options limited by the technicalities of their emergency Medicaid coverage. They could get sterilised, for free, right after their deliveries. But if they wanted the pill, the shot, or some other short term birth control? They were out of luck. But what we know is that reproductive justice isn't just about freedom from coercive sterilisation. It's also about access to a full range of reproductive technologies, whether that's birth control, sterilisation, abortion or even childbirth."

However, these issues never seem to make it to the agenda of the pro-life movement, which has expressed interest only in ending abortions; not in improving the lives of women. Perhaps the pro-life community would make more inroads with women of colour if they appeared to care more about easing the conditions leading women to seek abortion and less about flexing political might.

ещё одна статья в Гардиан о кампании в Джорджии и техасском фильме

PP does not target minorities

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. himself, a longtime supporter of Margaret Sanger and the birth control movement: "There is striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger's early efforts ... Our sure beginning in the struggle for equality by nonviolent direct action may not have been so resolute without the tradition established by Margaret Sanger and people like her."

The real issue is disparities in health-care access, something the African-American community experiences across the country

Suggesting that the Women's Right to Know Act [what is this?] would help reduce abortion in the African-American community is insulting. That implies that women of color are incapable of or unable to make this very personal, difficult decision. In reality, this bill is designed to shame women, to intimidate them when they are in a vulnerable situation. That's not health care, and I definitely cannot equate it to the comprehensive, compassionate options counseling - which includes our adoption services and access to prenatal care - that is provided to every woman facing an unintended pregnancy at a Planned Parenthood center.

We cannot continue to allow myths about family planning to be presented as fact.

Women of Color and the Anti-Choice Focus on Eugenics

The angle – that reproductive health care providers are organized to increase abortions by people of color in a plot to commit genocide for profit – has been in play by anti-choicers for years.  That theory has been, is now, and will always be insultingly paternalistic in its assumptions about women of color seeking reproductive health care.


I’ve heard of the black genocide conspiracy for years.  I am an activist in my home city of St. Louis Missouri and many of the young women of color I work with are aware of the rumors and ask questions about them.  

In my volunteer work I have met young women who thought drinking a certain soft drink would either prevent pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections; others who have heard that contraceptives give users HIV; and some who were convinced that the withdrawal method protected them from sexually transmitted infections.  In the absence of knowledge, dangerously inaccurate information reigns supreme without challenge or correction.  
........

The truth is:

• Black women are more likely to be diagnosed with cervical cancer at a later stage and are more likely to die of cervical cancer.

• Black people make up 13 percent of the population in the United States yet account for more than 49 percent of AIDS cases. AIDS is the leading cause of death for Black women between the ages 25 to 34, and the second leading cause of death for Black men between the ages 35 to 44.

• Black and Hispanic women have the highest teen pregnancy rates.

• Forty percent of Black Americans report being uninsured at some point from 2007 through 2008.

• Black women continue to die from breast cancer at alarming rates and a recent study found that half of Black teenage women reported having had one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases.

 

Clearly there are a lot of health-care related reasons why reproductive health care providers seek to provide services to communities of color.

Women of color are not children unable to make health care decisions, our children are not a species on the brink of extinction through an organized genocidal plot and justice is found when a people are unbound and empowered by medically accurate knowledge rather than dogma.  This Black History Month, despite well-produced marketing campaigns designed to spark fear and perpetuate myths, we must recommit ourselves to the struggle for reproductive justice in our communities.  Now, more than ever, we need to address the realities on the ground and reject the conspiracy theories being shouted by the anti-choice mob. 

Pamela Merritt

feminist view

Faye Wattleton, an African American woman was president of Planned Parenthood from 1978–1992 (14 years)

need more info bout Faye ;)

from Do Black Women’s Reproductive Rights Matter?

«atlanta antiabortion» на Яндекс.Фотках

Negro Project revisited

calm christian paper:

Margaret Sanger and The Infamous “Negro Project”

with reference to MSPP

reason 4 a blacks 2 be Republican

naturally it should be easy to understand -- Sanger is used in the parties' struggle in the US = demo vs repu

Republicans as not so popular among blacks use abortion which is democratic to attack Sanger and related topics

There are plenty of reasons blacks should be Republican. For starters, our policies don’t oppress minorities like Democrat policies (such as welfare and abortion, which was championed by Margaret Sanger to erradicate [sic] blacks and other minorities).
Joyce Peppin, a Republican from Roger

Martin Luther King about MS

On May 5, 1966, accepting the Margaret Sanger award bestowed on Martin Luther King, his wife, Coretta, read her husband's speech.

Part of that speech is shared here. and here