According to the British Daily Mail of March 8, 2011 there has been yet another attempt to link Margaret Sanger to race genocide:
The Mail reported that a billboard in Flint, Michigan was banned for using this quote from Sanger: “We do not want word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.” Flint Area Right to Life, the group responsible for the billboard, was quoted as saying that the ban is hiding the truth about Sanger: “If you read her biography, she was very much tied to the Ku Klux Klan, to the Nazis, to Hitler. She very much wanted thoroughbreds. That’s the word she used, thoroughbreds, and the way to make that happen was to eliminate minorities. She called them weeds in the garden of life. Those are her words. It’s an accurate historic quote.”
Planned Parenthood’s Mid and South Michigan affiliate responded rather feebly, in my estimation, noting that the criticisms came from anti-choice groups who took Sanger’s words out of context. PPFA usually makes the case that Sanger embraced ideas that are not popular today–that she was a product of her time, unenlightened about what have become sensitive social issues. The local affiliate followed the usual line of thinking. Desiree Cooper, director of community and media relations for Planned Parenthood of Mid and South Michigan, used the old Thomas Jefferson comparison. “We hold up Thomas Jefferson as one of our founding fathers, the author of the Declaration,” she told a reporter. “He owned slaves, and he was talking about the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
The problem with this defense is that it doesn’t address the fact that the original attack on Sanger is not historically accurate. Her remark that “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population” is extracted from a 1939 letter she wrote to birth control advocate Clarence Gamble about the best strategy for delivering contraceptive services to poor black women in the rural South. Sanger, a champion of educating each woman about her reproductive options, was aware of fears among African Americans–inflamed by the black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey and others–-about the survival of the black race. Sanger wanted to work with the black community, not impose her views on it. She told Gamble that, “while the colored Negroes have great respect for white doctors they can get closer to their own members and more or less lay their cards on the table. . . . they do not do this with the white people and if we can train the Negro doctor at the clinic, he can go among them with enthusiasm and with knowledge, which, I believe, will have far-reaching results among the colored people.” She believed that ministers would also play an important role in allaying black fears, explaining, “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.”
What is always missing from these over-simplified, historically inaccurate accounts is that spreading information about birth control was often fraught with peril. It demanded careful political and legal strategies, and community-based education and planning. What is so easily overlooked is that Sanger and other movement leaders believed birth control is a basic human right, but not something that can be imposed on individuals or groups.
The remark about wanting to create “a race of thoroughbreds” was made, not by Sanger, but by Dr. Edward A. Kempf, a physician who argued for state-funded maternal and infant care clinics. “Society must make life worth the living and the refining for the individual,” Kempf wrote, “by conditioning him to love and to seek the love-object in a manner that reflects a constructive effect upon his fellow-men and by giving him suitable opportunities. The virility of the automatic apparatus is destroyed by excessive gormandizing or hunger, by excessive wealth or poverty, by excessive work or idleness, by sexual abuse or intolerant prudishness. The noblest and most difficult art of all is the raising of human thoroughbreds.” Sanger quoted Kempf’s phrase in her book The Pivot of Civilization. She also used the phrase as the banner on the November 1921 issue of the Birth Control Review, the journal she edited until 1929: “Birth Control: To Create a Race of Thoroughbreds.”
Margaret Sanger did try to ally herself with the eugenics movement, but clearly rejected racist eugenic thinking. And she did attend a woman’s Ku Klux Klan meeting in New Jersey in the 1920s to get support for birth control lobbying. It was not a particularly successful event for her (and she found it spooky). Sanger was almost always willing to work with others who supported birth control, regardless of whether or not she agreed with them on other beliefs and issues. However, her tendency to wear blinders in order to promote her controversial cause and secure scientific support from respected eugenicists was not akin to owning slaves.
Read more:
http://www.plannedparenthoodnj.org/library/topic/contraception/margaret_sanger
Margaret Sanger Papers Project 
LIAR! Sounds like her attendance at the KKK meetings was quite successful.
Try again before you call Herman Cain a liar ….Stupid people are ruining America!
“I accepted an invitation to talk to the women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan…I saw through the door dim figures parading with banners and illuminated crosses…I was escorted to the platform, was introduced, and began to speak…In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered.” (Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography, P.366)
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Fascinating analysis. I recently heard another Sangor critique from the right and arrived here while trying to check the facts. I come to the conclusion that MS probably wasn’t nearly the tyrannical figure the pro-life people want to believe, however there also appears to be some shady things going on.
The document in question (letter to CJG) I found at:
http://smithlibraries.org/digital/items/show/495
does indeed show MS said: “We do not want word to go out..”
I’ve also seen/heard it quoted as: “We do not want word to get out…”
Which is it? go or get? One has to admit, it’s a very important difference when taken in full context.
What I find interesting, look closely at that letter to CJ Gamble. There is a very interesting mistake made on the word “go”, there are two mysterious spaces getween “go” and “out”. Also, if you zoom in closely, I believe that jpg file has been photoshopped and that second space has been erased because it’s a very un-naturally uniform pixel color.
So, there’s a bit of subterfuge at play here. I think people like Cain, in all honestly and eagerness to make a point was just one more example of a misquoting of MS to try and put forth his case that abortion is immoral. I also think that perhaps there may be a bit of wrongdoing on the other side and I would encourage someone like perhaps “sangerpapers” to look at the original letter (not the jpg, not the pdf) and tell is if it’s “go” or if it’s “get”
I actually sit on the fence re: abortion and see extremely valid points in both pro-life and pro-choice sides. I just strongly dislike when either deliberately cheats to make a point. I give Herman Cain leeway in the heat of a political campaign to try and come up with good zingers off-the-cuff. That’s hardly pants-on-fire stuff because those same (mis?)quotes can be found all over the place. Not everyone is willing to look it up like I did and have the honesty to give it a fair analysis. Politifact certainly won’t, they rarely treat both sides evenly.
Thanks for your comment. We microfilmed the original document in 1996 and it appears the same way on our film. If you look, there are other spacing anomalies on the original –between “cons” and “battered,” “been” and “justified,” “Tennessee” and “and” and “be” and “entirely,” which make the one between “go” and “out” seem less sinister.
Can you post a link to the letter in question please?
To which etter are you referring. The post cites several.
The correspondence she exchanged with Dr. Gamble concerning the Negro Project that is so often quoted as proof of her racist views.
For a copy of the original (MS to Gamble, Nov. 29, 1939, see The Margaret Sanger Papers Microfilm Edition: Smith College Collections, reel 17, frame 514. For availability, see http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/publications/smith_series.php
For transcribed copy, see The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, Vol. 3, the Politics of Planned Parenthood.
I have been trying to get that letter from myriad colleges all day and as I suspected, since you posted the link, it has been removed.
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