The Negro Project

The Black Stork Part 5: What Margaret Sanger Was Up To

How do you reduce the fertility of Black Americans using a medical campaign when Black Americans rightfully feared the American Medical establishment?

This was Margaret Sanger’s problem. She had previously been focused on the “problem” of the Eastern Europeans. That history in itself is intriguing, and a reminder of the permeability of the concept of “Whiteness” and who gets to be considered “White.” For a good period of time, Eastern Europeans were considered “unhygienic” and their particular ethnicities were pronounced and looked down upon. Later, it would become politically expedient to include those people as “Good Whites” to beef up social voting blocks, but that is another old story for another time.

Harriet Washington writes in this chapter of Medical Apartheid that Sanger popularized a shift in how eugenics was articulated and her research on the “value” of different types of American families. She did away with the labels of “good” or “bad” stock and discussed “income level” and “class”. She looked at “Negro” districts and saw pronounced social ills and parlayed that dysfunction as representative of Black families.

In 1929, Sanger began in earnest her work toward Black populations. Exploiting existing stereotypes about Black people, Sanger set out to reduce the fertility and number of African-American populations. She found examples of African-American families living in segregated, socially disinvested areas, and instead of looking at the various class and economic injustices perpetuated against them, decided that their very existence in “excess” (my words) was the problem.

Up to this point, Sanger had been instrumental in bringing down much of what was known as The Comstock Laws. Another fellow New Yorker, by the name of Anthony Comstock, was the driving force behind a slew of laws (and copycat legislation) that had criminalized birth control on the basis that it was lewd and promoted promiscuity decades prior. He started to gain steam in his efforts in the 1860s, and his influence would be felt legally until about the 1960s. The laws were objectively restrictive, and it became a federal crime to disseminate contraception. Married couples were not given a pass either, and could even be arrested and prosecuted for using birth control. This role in the government regulating procreation or one’s desire to not procreate was accepted legally if not always enforced carefully. This legal acceptance by the American culture of this form of governmental regulation will be helpful in understanding the later birth control battles. Sanger was particularly against this kind of regulation and found herself on the end of some pivotal lawsuits that became major turning points legally.

It is important to note that Sanger was a proponent of Negative Eugenics. Positive Eugenics is when you encourage a group with “desirable” traits to procreate. Negative Eugenics is when you encourage a group with “undesirable” traits to procreate less or not at all. Sanger had not always been a eugenicist and had started out as a women’s rights advocate. She watched in horror as White women died from high-risk pregnancies or were left alone outside of any significant, systemized healthcare from a government that criminalized efforts to prevent additional pregnancies. This horror, as mentioned before, was matched in many Black communities who had even less access to healthcare and had dire economic circumstances that the legal system made it difficult to break out of. Sanger’s desire to shrink social ills by reducing the Black population was not thrown out in disgust by many Black women but cautiously embraced. Later this would break down among gender lines, but Sanger did not have to “sneak” to garner community support. The toxic presence of White Supremacy and the reality of raising children under it had already made inroads.

After her own research into the birth rates of New York, Sanger had set her sights on Harlem, where the majority of New York’s Black population lived, and began to find and recruit Black leaders to the cause. W.E.B. Du Bois was helpful and often quoted by Sanger. “Eugenic discrimination” and this mindset of lower-class Black families having fewer children was embraced by some of the leaders Sanger entreated. There was dismay among some Black intellectuals that in the current political and economic context of Black disenfranchisement, having more and more children was a liability to the community’s advancement. Sanger knew that Black families seeking contraception, however, would be loathe to enter the very medical establishment that had brutalized them in slavery. Sanger would later begin The Negro Project which in her words, was “established for the benefit of the negro people” and she sought to make her experimental family planning centers a more welcoming environment for Black women especially. Sanger is often quoted for her desire to communicate that her centers were not for the extermination of the entire Black population but to combat Black social ills. But this famous quote of hers has been run both ways, with some seeing it in a context of disgust (Sanger wanting to hide her true motivations) and others in the context of social care (Sanger wanting to be clear she had no overarching plan to harm the Black patients). What further muddies the waters is that she had a backup in the form of prominent African American leaders who trusted her enough to work with her, and who also agreed that eugenic “discrimination” should be practiced among their social group. “Discrimination” is a very different thing than “extermination”. Sanger was absolutely racist, but the aim of her racism will forever be debated. This tangle of intent and impact is also going to come back to haunt all the later debates about the arrival and impact of birth control within minority populations in America. Harriet Washington points out that Sanger was very careful about what she said and how she said it, so what has to really be taken into account is what Sanger actually did with the political power she fought for and then wielded.

Sanger and her cohort of African- American colleagues agreed that the most powerful endorsement of the family planning centers had to come from the pulpit. She would later install a Black doctor and social worker within her system to put the patients at ease. Her American Birth Control League merged with the Clinical Research Bureau to form The Birth Control Federation of America in 1939, and later that year she started The Negro Project, assuring the White professionals within it that they would be able to sufficiently control the Black doctor and social worker. Eventually, that relationship soured as the Black personnel chafed under the lack of autonomy. The Birth Control Federation of America withdrew its support, and this Harlem clinic of the Negro Project was closed.

But the impact and the reach of Sanger’s plans and ideas was far from over. Her sights, along with other birth control advocates, were also set on the American South, where the majority of the African American population resided and where public health infrastructure was still new or nonexistent. It was in this shadow of a slaveholding regime that had once rebelled against the government and cradled the Confederacy that Sanger’s other battle -for the development of The Pill- would dramatically play out over the decades.