Margaret Sanger and The Infamous “Negro Project”

There are legitimate issues that can and should be discussed rationally in the abortion wars but rarely are. The anti-abortion movement seems intent on continually putting out misinformation, distorting facts, rewriting history, demonizing abortion rights supporters and mis-characterizing the work of Planned Parenthood.

Typical of the misinformation being spread by anti-abortionists is a recent propaganda film being shown in anti-abortion circles promoting the absurd proposition that abortion rights supporters are really engaged in a devious and sinister racist campaign to reduce the black urban population and attempt to make their case by what they characterize as documentary evidence. After a showing in my area an anti-abortion activist asserted in commentary written in less than correct English: “Margret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, whose big idea was the “Negro Project”. It was her and Planned Parenthood’s belief that black people were too stupid and “feeble minded” and needed to be limited in there ability to reproduce.” [sic]

That statement is categorically false (and illiterate), but it is part of an ongoing national smear campaign against Margaret Sanger by activists in the anti-abortion movement, often repeated in their publications which copy each other, but without any factual basis.

So a fact check: There was a Negro Project instigated by Margaret Sanger. It was about birth control and family planning and was not about abortion. In the paragraphs below I have excerpted some lines from the Sanger Papers. To head off the charge that I am quoting selectively I have enclosed the link to the entire history of this project below so that those interested in facts can read the history for themselves.

The Negro Project was developed by birth control reformers, who consulted with African-Americans for help. It was widely supported by such black leaders as Mary McLeod Bethune, W. E. B. DuBois, and Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Sanger wrote an initial fund-raising request 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.”

Sanger viewed the Negro Project as another effort to help African-Americans gain better access to safe contraception and maintain birth control services in their community as she had attempted to do in Harlem a decade earlier when Sanger’s Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau opened a clinic there.

By the late 1930s, birth control activists began to focus on high birth rates and poor quality of life in the South, alerted to alarming Southern poverty by a 1938 U.S. National Resource Committee report which asserted that Southern poverty drained resources from other parts of the country. Starting in the mid-1930s, Sanger sent field workers into the rural South to establish birth control services in poor communities and conduct research. She sought to test various contraceptive jellies and foam powders to see if they could effectively be used without a diaphragm, which would be cheaper and easier for poor women to use. These birth control initiatives were designed, in part, to demonstrate to government bureaucrats on the county, state and federal levels that contraceptive clinics were essential in impoverished Southern communities and could be successfully duplicated in other regions.

The entire article can be found at: http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/secure/newsletter/articles/bc_or_race_control.html