What Led to the Negro Project?
The Black Stork Part 4: The context that birthed a controversial eugenic movement and icon.
In 1883, a Socialist gave birth to a baby girl in the city of Corning, in New York. This baby would grow up and overturn laws against contraception bans and work alongside prominent Civil Rights voices like Martin Luther King Junior, Adam Clayton Powell Junior, and many Black healthcare providers. She would become the most famous populizer of the American Eugenic movement, drawing praise for liberating some and accusations of causing Black genocide in the U.S.
Her name was Margaret Sanger, and her legacy is intricately tangled within the American history of the struggle for Black bodily autonomy.
From the time the first enslaved Africans were brought to America -before the USA was even formed as an independent nation- the legal reality of enslaved Africans losing all rights to their own bodies was established.
Recently my home state -Florida- approved some language around what slavery did and contributed to history. The claim that set off a firestorm was about how American slavery gave the enslaved skillsets that they could use for their own benefit. Aside from the fact that the enslaved actually brought to America skills that greatly helped their enslavers medically, agriculturally, and culturally, the context in which an enslaved person might have learned a skill matters. That very context is what many people with significant political and social power have been trying to rewrite or weaken. Being taught a skill or given an educational pointer by someone who legally owned you is not the win my governor seems to think it is. Being taught another skill helps the person who owns you make more money off of you while they own and when they sell you.
In the event you can take that skill and personally benefit from it, I must ask where? And in what America? Enslaved Africans lived in a country where they were not allowed to arm themselves to protect whatever they did have or their own bodies. They were unable to determine what happened to their children. They were unable to determine when or where they put their bodies. They were unable to stop or resist rape and forcible impregnation. They were unable to say what happened to the children of those rapes. They were not allowed to vote, which could have determined how they were treated or how their belongings were treated. They were not allowed to move or go anywhere freely, and if they did move about they were in a world where the legal system would not prosecute anyone who assaulted, stole, or killed them. To be given something, anything, in a society that was not built for your happiness, safety, or liberty is a double-edged sword.
This context must be considered when looking at the controversial legacy of Margaret Sanger and the entire, ongoing conversation of bodily autonomy today. Sanger brings up all sorts of complicated emotions for people today precisely because of that context and the present-day effect of our history on all people of color. For generations, Black women ( and other non-White women) in the U.S.A. have specifically been of interest to lawmakers and other people who stood to benefit from their reproductive abilities. Owning Black women meant the opportunity to generate more Black bodies! A widespread reality of slavery was that the work and the treatment across the board was so brutal and cruel, that the enslaved would not survive. And as we have learned, treating the enslaved for long-term health was actually not cost-effective and the enslaved were replaceable. Enslavers burned through bodies, selling broken down people to doctors for experimentation or abusing them to the point that insurance companies that insured enslaved bodies had to stop doing so because they realized enslavers would mutilate their own enslaved to collect on the cash.
When the Slave trade was cut off legally, enslavers turned to widespread rape (an old practice among enslavers previously) to ensure that they could keep population numbers up. The ability to determine when you had children, if you had children, how many children you had, where your children would live, what you would give your children, ect was not afforded to women of color. When the enslaved were freed, they now faced a society that did not want more of them or any of them anywhere. This was an America that churned out for generations laws against multi-ethnic marriages, multi-ethnic children, and social integration. While previously the problem had been there were not enough people of color, now that people believed to be White could no longer wholesale profit off the ownership of them, the people of color became “the problem” themselves.
“The Negro Issue” or the “Negro Problem” and what attended it was of great importance to people like Margaret Sanger who had an idea of what a healthy, great America would look like. And there is where the problematic motivations can overlap with mutually agreed-on outcomes. No one wants to live in cycles of poverty. No one wants to live in horribly constructed ghettos. No one wants to be part of a larger health crisis with poor medical infrastructure. No one wants to live in a sanitation desert, a food desert, or an educational desert. Formerly enslaved people and their ancestors found themselves navigating a legal system and society still working against them, and a dearth of support to build a life after 400 years of forced slavery and no access to personal land or capital. That is not to say there were no free families of African Americans who prospered and carved out lives for themselves of comfort and wealth. But they did not do that because America was accepting of them and offered liberty to pursue happiness, but in spite of it. These families and their wealth were typical exceptions.
Margaret Sanger record shows us a passionate woman who left behind many projects, writings, speeches, and opinions on what could make America healthier, safer, and better for people who were typically overlooked. The issue, is that Sanger, like so many people bent on creating a “fit” society of “fit” people is something of a blind spot to just how so many of the social issues started in the first place. The “Negro” problem was at its root a greed problem, a racial delusion problem, a disordered, unchecked capitalist problem that exploited workers, a misogynist problem, and a social class problem. People weren’t poor or badly off because of genes, they were direct reflections of what careful, intentional legislation had wrought. Healthy, successful people didn’t owe their good health and goods to DNA strands, but to generations of healthcare access, capital, and laws that protected their happiness and freedom. Proponents of American Eugenics went to the endpoint, the children being born in systems of oppression and greed and made the individual the problem. I am not saying that all of Sanger and the prominent Black people of power who worked with her were stupid imbeciles, but it is necessary to point out that this blindness collided with a real Black interest in managing the populations being born into cycles of poverty. Multiple things can be true at once. Sanger saw social dysfunction playing out in Black families and thought that presented a eugenics problem specific to Black people. Whereas people like MLK JR. were critically aware of the political constructions of class that Black people’s children were being born into, but shared some goals in creating access for Black women to health centers. Black women were often and blankly denied any treatment at the city health centers of the places they lived in.
Many Black women from before Sanger’s time to long after her death knew they were carrying pregnancies and birthing children in a social context that didn’t want their children but also would refuse to protect them. The ongoing lack of access to healthcare, prenatal, postnatal, or anything in general, the intense American scrutiny and disenfranchisement of Africans who sought a medical degree, the legal and social climate that allowed White people to kill and torture Black children in mobs, and an economic system that hemmed in the opportunity to build any measure of wealth was a burden and a very real consideration to Black women. To be pregnant was to open yourself and your future child up to all sorts of health and social ills that society would do absolutely nothing to help with, and in fact, actively worked against you.
Regardless of each reader’s view (religiously, politically, socially) of Contraception and abortion, it is important to understand the climate of the time and how it affected people. Contraception was not a standard, accessible option at the time, and when it did start to become a widespread option the U.S. government had laws against it. Legalized abortion was not a thing, and there were whispers and history of generations of women who had come up with various ways to exert some kind of control over their reproduction through makeshift contraception or abortions. Sanger’s legacy and work were able to rise because of this history. Women of color knew that everyone was involved in their birth and pregnancy, but up to a point, and then they were left on their own to navigate all the dangers of being pregnant and then raising a Black child. This was a very real concern and fear that must be considered before judging the various reception to what Sanger would later offer to Black people. It’s all connected, this long-standing legal control of Black women and their wombs, and this White woman’s desire to control society in another direction entirely. These decisions, long made by the government that strove to only allow men believed to be White positions of power and the people who owned other people, were about to bear very complicated fruit. It is in that context Margaret Sanger pivoted from her focus on the eugenics of Eastern Europeans to the African- Americans and presented her solution to the “Negro” problem. It is that context that should make all of us, no matter where we come from, pause before we speak on the decisions of countless enslaved and free African American women who were forced between bad choices and worse choices in their pregnancies. It should humble us a bit to think of the unthinkable desperation, pain, and trauma that has long haunted a group of women unfairly judged as “poor” and “bad” mothers. To remember that discomfort we feel in reading about and learning of that context is nothing compared to what it was like to live it.