Margaret Sanger's Racism

On this day in 1939, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood announced the organization’s new “Negro Project” in response to requests from southern state public health officials—men not generally known at that time for their racial equanimity. “The mass of Negroes,” her project proposal asserted, particularly in the South, still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes, even more than among Whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit.” The proposal went on to say that “Public Health statistics merely hint at the primitive state of civilization in which most Negroes in the South live.”

In order to remedy this “dysgenic horror story,” her project aimed to hire three or four “Colored Ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities” to travel to various Black enclaves and propagandize for birth control.

“The most successful educational approach to the Negro,” Margaret wrote sometime later, “is through a religious appeal. 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.”

Of course, those Black ministers were to be carefully controlled—mere figureheads. “There is a great danger that we will fail,” one of the project directors wrote, “because the Negroes think it a plan for extermination. Hence, let’s appear to let the colored run it.” Another project director lamented, “I wonder if Southern Darkies can ever be entrusted with . . . a clinic. Our experience causes us to doubt their ability to work except under White supervision.” The entire operation then was a ruse—a manipulative attempt to get African Americans to cooperate in their own elimination.

The program’s genocidal intentions were carefully camouflaged beneath several layers of condescending social service rhetoric and organizational expertise. Like the citizens of Hamelin, lured into captivity by the sweet serenades of the Pied Piper, all too many African Americans all across the country happily fell into step behind Margaret and the Eugenic racists she had placed on her Negro Advisory Council.

Soon taxpayer-supported clinics throughout the South were distributing contraceptives to African Americans and Sanger’s science fiction dream of discouraging “the defective and diseased elements of humanity” from their “reckless and irresponsible swarming and spawning” appeared at last to be on the road to fulfillment. Planned Parenthood had its first real success in social engineering.

Sarti and Immolation

Born in Northern Ireland to a wealthy Presbyterian family, Amy Carmichael (1867-1951) became one of the best known missionaries of the first half of the twentieth century. Her ministry took her first to Japan, then to Ceylon, and finally to the Dohnavur province of India.

Although the brutal Hindu traditions of sarti and immolation—burning widows alive on the funeral pyres of their deceased husbands—had been legally banned, to her horror she discovered that ritual abortion and female infanticide were still quite common. In addition, many of the young girls that she had come to work with were still being systematically sold off as slaves to the nearby pagan temples in order to be raised as cult prostitutes.

She immediately established a ministry to protect and shelter the girls. Although she had to suffer the persecution of various
Hindu sects and the bureaucratic resistance of the British colonial government, Carmichael built an effective and dynamic ministry renowned for its courage and compassion.

Sadly, many of her fellow missionaries in India—having partially accepted the presuppositions of Planned Parenthood’s Malthusian thought—believed that her effort to build an orphanage and school was actually a "worldly activity" that distracted her from the "saving of souls." To such accusations she simply replied, "Souls are more or less firmly attached to bodies."

Since her death in 1951, her Dohnavur Fellowship has continued to carry on ministries of evangelism, education, and medical aid among the poor and helpless. It remains one of the most dynamic Christian work on the Indian subcontinent.