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PolitiFact, the St. Petersburg Times website
designed to tell truth from lies in always rancorous American politics, tackled the by now familiar accusation that Margaret Sanger sought to exterminate African-Americans. They investigated the claim made by Georgia-based Republican presidential aspirant Herman Cain in a speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation:
“When Margaret Sanger – check my history – started Planned Parenthood, the objective was to put these centers in primarily black communities so they could help kill black babies before they came into the world.”
Poltifact did check–turning to ” scholarship, Cain’s camp, anti-abortion groups, Sanger’s biographer, and multiple experts on Cain’s claim,” and awarded Cain their lowest ranking: “Pants on Fire!” Writer and researcher Willoughby Mariano noted:
Sanger welcomed some of the movement’s more notorious leaders onto the board of a predecessor to Planned Parenthood. She also endorsed paying pensions to women of low intelligence who agreed to be sterilized.
But we found no evidence that Sanger advocated – privately or publicly – for anything even resembling the “genocide” of blacks, or that she thought blacks are genetically inferior.
Every academic PolitiFact Georgia consulted said that Cain’s claim is wrong.
and:
For Sanger to launch a genocidal plot behind their backs and leave no true evidence in her numerous writings would require powers just shy of witchcraft.
Really, calling the Negro Project a genocidal plot defies common sense. Why would Sanger try to destroy a race of people by giving them access to the very thing she thought could make life better?
Planned Parenthood’s early objective was not to “help kill black babies before they came into the world.”
Sanger failed to rise above the ethnic and racial paternalism of her time, but that’s a far cry from being genocidal.
Cain’s claim is a ridiculous, cynical play of the race card. We rate it Pants on Fire.
For the complete post, see http://www.politifact.com/georgia/statements/2011/apr/08/herman-cain/cain-claims-planned-parenthood-founded-planned-gen/
Margaret Sanger Papers Project 
>objective was not to “help kill black babies before they came into the world.
Thus you have to provide data on infanticide before and after intervention
Many of the arguments against Sanger accuse her of participation in something called “The Negro Project,” whose title apparently comes from a memo written by Clarence Gamble entitled “Suggestions for the Negro Project.” Do you know if this document really existed, and where I could find a copy of it?
It would also be helpful if you’d be willing to put this “Negro Project” in context. It’s difficult to research as most results are from strongly anti-Planned Parenthood websites.
A good place to start is an article on the Negro Project that we published in our Newsletter a while back. “Birth Control or Race Control: Sanger and the Negro Project.
“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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In this quote from Sanger’s An Autobiography, you put in a few ellipses indicating text you omitted. The full text offers a more compelling picture, I think:
You start your quote in the middle of a paragraph, but the full paragraph reads:
“All over the world, in Penang and Skagway, in El Paso and Helsingfors, I have found women’s psychology in the matter of childbearing essentially the same, no matter what class, religion, or economic status. Always t me any aroused group was a good group, and therefore I accepted an invitation to talk to the women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan at silver Lake, New Jersey, one of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing.”
Puts a kind of different spin on it, doesn’t it?
She then goes on to describe trying t follow the complicated, strange instructions she got to get to the car that would drive her to the event — walking several blocks going into a specific restaurant, ordered cocoa, waiting an allotted time, then approaching the car and getting in behind a speechless driver. When they finally arrived at their destination, she was then asked to wait in the car and was left alone, in the dark for three hours. She was then escorted into the building and room where she would speak, and she wrote,
“Never before had I looked into a sea of faces like these. I was sure if I uttered one word, such as abortion, outside the usual vocabulary of these women they would go off into hysteria. And so my address that night had to be in the most elementary terms, as though I were trying to make children understand.
“In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered.” (To our knowledge, she never accepted one again). The conversation went on and on, and when we were through it was too late to return to New York. Under a curfew law, everything in Silver Lake shut at nine o’clock. I could not even send a telegram to let my family know whether I had been thrown into the river or was being held incommunicado. It was nearly one before I reached Trenton, and I spent the night in the hotel.”
This was Sanger’s one and only contact with the Klan!
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