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Pubs assault PP by again raising racial-eugenics lies about Margaret Sanger

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KingOrfeo

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Again.

Last week, for example, GOP presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and his fellow Texan, Congressman Louie Gohmert, led a group of 25 Republican lawmakers who sent a letter to the director of the National Portrait Gallery urging the removal of a bust of Sanger from the gallery’s “Struggle for Justice” exhibit.

“There is no ambiguity in what Margaret Sanger’s bust represents: hatred, racism and the destruction of unborn life,” wrote Cruz. “So many of the people who have arisen out of poverty and done great things for the country and the world, if she had her way, they would have never been born,” said Gohmert.

Ben Carson, another GOP candidate for president, told Fox News in August: “I know who Margaret Sanger is, and I know that she believed in eugenics, and that she was not particularly enamored with black people. And one of the reasons that you find most of their clinics in black neighborhoods is so that you can find way to control that population.” In a speech last month in New Hampshire, Carson said that Sanger, “believed that people like me should be eliminated or kept under control. So, I’m not real fond of her to be honest or anything that she established.” At a press conference later, he specified what he meant by “people like me.” He said he was “talking about the black race.”

Back in March, New Hampshire Rep. William O’Brien claimed Sanger was an “an active participant in the Ku Klux Klan.”
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Look, here's the straight dope:

Margaret Sanger (September 14, 1879 – September 6, 1966) founded Planned Parenthood. Since this organization became pro-choice after her death, the Religious Right works itself into a lather itself by quote mining her speeches into portraits of a racist eugenicist madwoman (despite the fact that in reality she worked with W.E.B. Du Bois in Harlem and Martin Luther King accepted an award bearing her name).

Negative eugenics?

Sanger said some pretty kooky shit in regards to the woo that was a popular 1930's fake medical trend, eugenics. She believed that people with hereditary disabilities should be encouraged to use birth control. This was not the same as Hitler's state-enforced eugenics program and she decried the Nazi euthanasia programs.
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And:

Race

She collaborated with African-American leaders and professionals who saw a need for birth control in their communities. In 1929, James H. Hubert, a black social worker and leader of New York's Urban League, asked Sanger to open a clinic in Harlem.[93] Sanger secured funding from the Julius Rosenwald Fund and opened the clinic, staffed with black doctors, in 1930. The clinic was directed by a 15-member advisory board consisting of black doctors, nurses, clergy, journalists, and social workers. The clinic was publicized in the African-American press and in black churches, and it received the approval of W. E. B. Du Bois, founder of the NAACP.[94] Sanger did not tolerate bigotry among her staff, nor would she tolerate any refusal to work within interracial projects.[95] Sanger's work with minorities earned praise from Martin Luther King, Jr., in his 1966 acceptance speech for the Margaret Sanger award.[96]

From 1939 to 1942 Sanger was an honorary delegate of the Birth Control Federation of America, which included a supervisory role—alongside Mary Lasker and Clarence Gamble—in the Negro Project, an effort to deliver birth control to poor black people.[97] Sanger wanted the Negro Project to include black ministers in leadership roles, but other supervisors did not. To emphasize the benefits of involving black community leaders, she wrote to Gamble "we do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members." While New York University's Margaret Sanger Papers Project, argues that in writing that letter, "Sanger recognized that elements within the black community might mistakenly associate the Negro Project with racist sterilization campaigns in the Jim Crow South;"[98] Angela Davis uses the quote to support claims that Sanger intended to exterminate the black population.[99]
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Also, bear in mind that Sanger was not the only prominent person in her day to buy into the pseudoscience of eugenics.

Eugenics was first developed in the 19th century, a misguided outgrowth of an intellectual milieu influenced by the popularity of early evolutionary theory and which included a spate of works on genetic disorders (many of which are incurable horrors), "scientific racism" and the Social Darwinism of the likes of Herbert Spencer. The term "eugenics" was coined by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, in his 1883 book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. Galton was responsible for many of the early works of eugenics, including attempts to connect genetics with a most prized trait known as intelligence.[1]

In the United States, it was the biologist Charles Davenport who laid the groundwork for the establishment of eugenics programs.[2] Eugenics gained traction as it was championed in the nascent Progressive Era of the late 19th century into the early 20th century, finding prominent political proponents in presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. However, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and Winston Churchill were also fans of eugenics.[3][4][5]
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From Salon:

But what about Ben Carson’s accusations – similar to ones that Herman Cain made in 2012 when he was running for the Republican presidential nomination — that Sanger targeted black women in her birth control crusade?

Their claims are false, even though they are frequently repeated.

In 1930, with the support of the prominent black activist and intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois, the Urban League, and the Amsterdam News (New York’s leading black newspaper), Sanger opened a family planning clinic in Harlem, staffed by a black doctor and black social worker. The clinic was directed by a 15-member advisory board consisting of black doctors, nurses, clergy, journalists, and social workers.

Then, in 1939, key leaders in the black community encouraged Sanger to expand her efforts to the rural South, where most African Americans lived. Thus began the “Negro Project,” with Du Bois, Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of Harlem’s powerful Abyssinian Baptist Church, journalist and reformer Ida Wells, sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, educator Mary McLeod Bethune, and other black leaders lending support.

Sanger explained that the project was designed to help “a group notoriously underprivileged and handicapped…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 birth control as a way to empower black women, not as a means to reduce the black population. And according to Hazel Moore, who ran a birth control project in Virginia in the 1930s under Sanger’s direction, black women were very responsive to the birth control education under the “Negro Project.” At the same time, however, a number of Southern states began incorporating birth control services unevenly into their public health programs, which were rigidly segregated, providing health services to blacks that were poorly funded.

To the detriment of her reputation and to the cause of reproductive freedom, Sanger was also attracted to aspects of the eugenics movement. In the 1920s and 1930s, some scientists viewed eugenics as a way to identify the hereditary bases of both physical and mental diseases. Many people across the political spectrum –including Winston Churchill, Herbert Hoover, Theodore Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and even Du Bois – believed that humanity could be improved by selective breeding.

Others, however, viewed it as a means to create a “superior” human race. But eugenics and contraception did not go hand in hand. The Nazis opposed birth control and abortion for healthy and “fit” women in their effort to promote a white master race. In fact, Nazi Germany banned and burned Sanger’s books on family planning.

Although the eugenics movement included some who had racist ideas, wanting to create some sort of master race, “only a minority of eugenicists” ever believed this, according to Ruth Engs, professor emerita at the Indiana University School of Public Health and an expert in the movement.

At the time that Sanger was active, Engs wrote, “the purpose of eugenics was to improve the human race by having people be more healthy through exercise, recreation in parks, marriage to someone free from sexually transmitted diseases, well-baby clinics, immunizations, clean food and water, proper nutrition, non-smoking and drinking.”

Race-based eugenics was practiced in the United States as well. Blacks were used as unwitting subjects for medical experiments, such as the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service from 1932 to 1972. Poor and especially black women were frequently sterilized in hospitals, often without their knowledge.

Many of the eugenics movement’s leaders were racists and anti-Semites who promoted involuntary sterilization in order to help breed a “superior” race.

But Sanger was not among them. Her primary focus was on freeing women who lived in poverty from the burden of unwanted pregnancies. She embraced eugenics to stop individuals from passing down mental and physical diseases to their descendants, whatever we may think of that practice today. In a 1921 article, she argued that “the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.”

By today’s standards, these words are certainly troublesome, but Sanger always repudiated the use of eugenics on specific racial or ethnic groups. She believed that reproductive choices should be made by individual women. According to Jean H. Baker, a history professor at Goucher College and the author of a biography of Sanger, the women’s equality activist “was far ahead of her times in terms of opposing racial segregation.”

Neither Sanger nor Planned Parenthood sought to coerce black women into using birth control or getting sterilized. In the 1920s, when anti-immigrant sentiment reached a peak and some scientists justified restricting immigration (as in the Immigration Act of 1924) by claiming that some ethnic groups were mentally and physically inferior, Sanger spoke out against such stereotyping.

Sanger wanted women to be able to avoid unwanted pregnancies. She worked for women of all classes and races to have that choice, which she believed to be a right.

Even so, over the years Sanger’s flirtation with eugenics has provided fodder for attacks from the right. As several of her biographers have documented, a number of racist statements have been falsely attributed to Sanger. Carson’s most recent anti-Sanger diatribe is simply the latest in a long string of bogus accusations against her and Planned Parenthood, designed to score political points with the GOP’s base.

And what about his claim that most Planned Parenthood clinics are in black neighborhoods? According to the Guttmacher Institute, only about 110 of Planned Parenthood’s 800 clinics are in areas where blacks make up over 25 percent of the overall population.

Planned Parenthood establishes clinics based on where medical needs—including a shortage of primary care providers and a high poverty rate—are the greatest. They provide women with birth control information and services, test women for infections, offer antibiotics, pregnancy tests, and Pap smears, and teach women how to do breasts self-exams. They also provide abortions and give women an alternative to ending pregnancies in unsafe conditions.

And what about Congressman O’Brien’s claim that Sanger was a Klu Klux Klanner? Totally false, Politifact found.
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"Their (Republican, however that you slice it) claims are false, even though they are frequently repeated."

Misinformation, disinformation, bad information, disproved information, information constructed out of thin air...
 
Angela Davis is a vocal critic of Sanger. Hardly a Republican. More hard line Black Panther Communist.
 
gotsnowgotslush said:
"Their (Republican, however that you slice it) claims are false, even though they are frequently repeated."

Misinformation, disinformation, bad information, disproved information, information constructed out of thin air...
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motorboat.......but,but,but,but,but,but,but,but,but,but,but,but,but,but,but,but,but,but,but,but,but, but,but,but,but,but,but,but,but....


Comshaw
 
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This KingOrfeo dude reminds me of Pecksniff. Passing off the known communist as " prominent black activist and intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois,":rolleyes:;)
 
YDB95 said:
The man himself wrote in 1940, "I am not a communist ... On the other hand, I ... believe ... that Karl Marx ... put his finger squarely upon our difficulties ..." He did eventually join the party in 1961, purely as an act of spite against the McCarran act, not because he really supported the party itself.
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The source I cited was the CPUSA for God's sake. He has always been known for his Communist Party connections. You said he wasn't a Communist. You were quite typically wrong. Just sayin'.
 
Rightguide said:
The source I cited was the CPUSA for God's sake. He has always been known for his Communist Party connections. You said he wasn't a Communist. You were quite typically wrong. Just sayin'.
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The point is, his relationship with the CPUSA was a LOT more complicated than you are implying, as usual. Just sayin'.
 
YDB95 said:
The point is, his relationship with the CPUSA was a LOT more complicated than you are implying, as usual. Just sayin'.
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He joined the party, you were wrong. He spent a lifetime promoting communist ideology.
 
Rightguide said:
He joined the party, you were wrong.
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Context matters.

He spent a lifetime promoting communist ideology.
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It just is not that simple. He mostly associated with communists on an enemy-of-my-enemy basis. And as I noted above, he supported some elements of Marx's philosophy (which is wholly understandable for a Black man in the Jim Crow era) but did not identify as a communist.
 
The left has spent the last year and half trying to erase anyone with racist ties from society and history. It's interesting watching the squirm as they try to rationalize not cancelling Margaret Sanger.
 
Cubantripod said:
The left has spent the last year and half trying to erase anyone with racist ties from society and history. It's interesting watching the squirm as they try to rationalize not cancelling Margaret Sanger.
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What's to rationalize? Most of the claims about her from the anti-choicers are proven false, and no one denies that she did hold some views that are no longer acceptable - just not the ones the anti-choicers like to claim. I don't see any squirming.
 
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