Smithsonian ignores Margaret Sanger backlash, black abortions and eugenics legacy
The Smithsonian National Gallery has denied the request of a group of ministers, Ministers Taking a Stand, that the bust of Margaret Sanger should be taken down.
In a letter to the Gallery last week, Sanger should be removed because she was a eugenicist who wanted to extinguish the black race by promoting black abortions.
“Perhaps the Gallery is unaware that Ms. Sanger supported black eugenics, a racist attitude toward black and other minority babies, an elitist attitude toward those she regarded as ‘the feeble minded;’ speaking at a rally of Ku Klux Klan women; and communications with Hitler sympathizers,” the letter to the Gallery’s director, Kim Sajet, said.
Sajet and the Gallery claim that the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery is not a “hall of fame,” but rather a collection of people who shaped history, and thus individuals like John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald also have places there. The Gallery said that they do not condone all of Sanger’s beliefs, but recognize the role she played in history…Margaret Sanger is included in the museum’s collection, not in tribute to all her beliefs, many of which are now controversial, but because of her leading role in early efforts to distribute information about birth control and medical information to disadvantaged women,” the gallery’s statement to the Ministers said, “as well as her later roles associated with developing modern methods of contraception and in founding Planned Parenthood of America.”
The Ministers remain unconvinced.
“Planned Parenthood continues to suppress the growth of minority populations by locating 70% of its abortion facilities within in or near black and Latino communities …. This explains why elective abortion remains the number one cause of death among black Americans, higher than all other causes combined. We will not remain silent while the National Portrait Gallery venerates someone who sought to eradicate our very existence. Ms. Sanger was a racist, elitist, and her beliefs led to massive destruction of unborn human life. She was no hero,” the pastors proclaimed in their letter.
Some famous quotes:
[We should] apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring. — Woman and the New Race, ch. 6: “The Wickedness of Creating Large Families.”
Article 1. The purpose of the American Baby Code shall be to provide for a better distribution of babies… and to protect society against the propagation and increase of the unfit.
Article 4. No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child, and no man shall have the right to become a father, without a permit…
Article 6. No permit for parenthood shall be valid for more than one birth. — “Plan for Peace” from Birth Control Review (April 1932, pp. 107-108)
Give dysgenic groups [people with “bad genes”] in our population their choice of segregation or [compulsory] sterilization. — “America Needs a Code for Babies,” 27 Mar 1934
Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race. — April 1932 Birth Control Review, pg. 108
We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the 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. — Woman, Morality, and Birth Control. New York: New York Publishing Company, 1922. Page 12.
A woman’s duty: To look the whole world in the face with a go-to-hell look in the eyes… to speak and act in defiance of convention. — Margaret Sanger’s December 19, 1939 letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble, 255 Adams Street, Milton, Massachusetts. Also described in Linda Gordon’s Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976.
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