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.
