http://www.soulcare.org/Creation/racism_bible_study.htm
'The Negro Project'
Deborah Simmons
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Deborah Simmons [a woman of color] is deputy editorial page editor for The
Washington Times. Her column appears on Fridays.
Published 2/8/2002
Before we get any further into Black History Month, I thought I'd help
pass on some information of significance. This is not to belittle what
others have said or might say. It's just that, well, so much of what black
history really means to America has been commercialized or reduced to
trivial pursuits of the first black this and the first black that. And,
although we still need to be reminded of the short distance between here and
not-so-far-back there, we also occasionally need to take stock. So here
goes.
You know who the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was, and most of us know,
or at least think we know, what he stood for, right? I said "think we know"
because I offer up what portends to be a little-known black history fact.
Margaret Higgins Sanger, the mother of Planned Parenthood and grand dame of
latter-day women's lib balderdash, hoodwinked the good reverend doctor -
who, in his May 1966 acceptance speech of the Margaret Sanger Award, granted
by Planned Parenthood Federation of America, mentioned a striking "kinship
between our [civil rights movement] and Margaret Sanger's early efforts."
Poor King, moving orator though he was, misspoke.
First, a little about the socialist herself. Sanger, born in 1879 into
an Irish Catholic family, was encouraged by her father to be a
nonconformist. While in nursing school, she married architect William Sanger
and they had three children. The Sangers first lived for many years in
Hastings, an affluent suburb of Westchester, N.Y., but her wanderlust lured
her to New York City. As a visiting nurse on the Lower East Side, it was
there that she adopted the cause of birth-control (and, shh, abortion) as
one sidebar to her eugenics-based radicalism after a poor woman died
following an "unwanted" pregnancy. In 1916, Sanger opened her first
birth-control clinic, an illegal birth-control clinic, setting in motion
abominable ends to the beauty of giving life.
Over three generations, Sanger founded the Birth Control Review, which
regularly published pro-eugenics writings. Also during that time, she was
jailed for passing on obscene literature and chastised repeatedly by the
religious community. She had even shamelessly abandoned her own family in
the name of, ahem, the cause, and took up with several men - including the
English novelist H.G. Wells - and fled America to avoid prosecution.
Undeterred and unbowed, Sanger and a precursor to Planned Parenthood, the
Birth Control Federation of America, decided to turn their attention to
black folk. They devised a plan for an "experimental" clinic that Sanger
said would "reduce the birth rate among ... elements unable to provide for
themselves, and the burden of which we are all forced to carry," writes
Tanya L. Green, author of "The Negro Project: Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Plan
for Black Americans."
Sanger convinced black ministers, doctors and teachers - including
NAACP co-founder W.E.B. DuBois - and others who straddled the upper echelons
of black America, that so-called family planning programs (including
abortion, hush-hush) were a good thing. Blessedly, not all were so easy
convinced. After holding a mass meeting on Sanger's behalf at the hugely
popular and powerful Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, many blacks sensed
the undercurrent of eugenics. In fact, the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Sr.,
whose son succeeded him in Abyssinian's pulpit and later became a
congressman, was an adviser to Sanger and her band of
population-controllers, and took considerable criticism for his role for
allowing "that awful woman in his church," Ms. Green writes. "Eventually,
the Urban League took control of the clinic, an indication that the black
community had become ensnared in Sanger's labyrinth." (You can read more
about this at
www.cwfa.org.)
Any woman who dares to claim that Planned Parenthood has strayed from
Sanger's insidious "Negro Project" has got be mad, a sister from another
planet.
So, people, do not miss the point. Please don't get hung up on the
word Negro, it was the preferred and respectable word of choice in those
days and, Lord knows, we have been, and are, called far worse. And please
don't go that other route, that victim route. Don't you dare let me hear you
say, "Oh, the poor ignorant Negroes just couldn't comprehend the wonders of
birth-control."
Stick to the issue. Sanger shrewdly used the influence of prominent
blacks to reach the masses of those least in position to help themselves.
But, instead of offering them charity and comfort, she misled these women -
be they poor, ignorant, black, Irish, Jewish or otherwise - to believe that
the real conspirators were men who wanted to control their bodies. (Do all
whores think that way?)
Make no mistake: Margaret Sanger's views were bigoted, racist and
sexist, and she was cunning to boot. Read Sanger's own words for yourself.
"We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro
population," she once wrote.
I can't for the life of me figure out how women continue to sing the
praises of such a woman - a woman who rebelled against her Catholic
upbringing in particular and God in general, spat at her mother for having
11 children, rebelled against her own motherhood and rebelled against
marital monogamy by flitting from man to man.
Please, visit Ms. Green's writings at
hhttp://cwfa.org/library/life/2001-05_pp_n-project.shtml and see how
Sanger's twisted legacy took root. Then, perhaps, you'll better understand
why I chose this topic as my first column honoring Black History Month.
--
It [charity] encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the world
to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others;
which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of
human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that
are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to
render them to a menacing degree dominant [emphasis added].11
Margaret Sanger
--
Atheism teaches that there is no God, hence no God-given rights. That
ideology coupled with a system that believed in the superiority of the state
at the expense of the individual was murderously synergistic.
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