Posted on 02/22/2005 1:45:09 PM PST by rface
Dear Editor,:
Nearly 35 years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. was honored with Planned Parenthood’s "Margaret Sanger Award," named after the courageous woman who, in 1916, opened the first birth-control clinic in New York City and founded the Planned Parenthood movement. King was recognized for his strong support of family planning.
The words of King still have a great impact on our cause today: "There is no human circumstance more tragic than the persisting existence of a harmful condition for which a remedy is readily available. Family planning, to relate population to world resources, is possible, practical and necessary. Unlike plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases we do not yet understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess."
King stated that the civil rights movement he led and the birth-control movement that Margaret Sanger led were similar. "There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger’s early efforts. She, like we, saw the horrifying conditions of ghetto life. Like we, she knew that all of society is poisoned by cancerous slums. Like we, she was a direct actionist - a nonviolent resister. The years have justified her actions. She launched a movement which is obeying a higher law to preserve human life under humane conditions."
Planned Parenthood continues to carry on the mission reaffirmed by Martin Luther King Jr. to provide safe, affordable family planning methods to all.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. John Higdon
(address removed - but available at the link)
Columbia, Missouri 65202
Here ya go:
http://blackgenocide.org/sanger.html
If this is true, and the quote attributed to King is legitimate ... well, blech!
So would it be a stretch to say that Martin Luther King aided and abetted an organization based upon committing genocide?
I don't think she founded Planned Parenthood - she started the American Eugenics Society I believe and after the defeat of Hitler then they changed their name to Planned Parenthood...
Too weird.
BUMP.
Before I believe this I'd like to see this quote in a credible source not just in a letter. If you find anything, will you ping?
Well MLK, Jr. tried to make up for it by jumping into bed with every white woman he could - especially the married ones.
They gave Dr. King an award named after a woman who once said "Sterilization or segregation" in response to her views on African Americans.
I think that might depend on what you mean by "family planning"--remember that abortion was not legal when King spoke. He could have meant "family planning" as education and/or birth control for women so that a woman wouldn't get pregnant again and again. Planned Parenthood is obviously strongly in favor of abortion, but just to say "family planning" in the 1960s might not have meant that.
well, the author is flashing his credentials (Dr.) on this letter......
He received the award in 1966. A Google turns up hits on his acceptance speech, but the text is gone from the PP website.
That's possible. But the quote (whether correctly attributed or not) seems to me to have the connotation of "too many black people!"
Note that they did not use the title "Reverend" for MLK. I think the family planning he supported was of the educational and contraceptive type...not the abortion type. And I have to think that MLK was ignorant of Sanger's history if he accepted an award with her name on it.
In 1966, Planned Parenthood® Federation of America inaugurated the PPFA Margaret Sanger Award to honor the woman who founded America's family planning movement. The PPFA Margaret Sanger Award is given annually to individuals of distinction in recognition of excellence and leadership in furthering reproductive health and reproductive rights.
In its first year, the award was bestowed upon four men:
Dr. Carl G. Hartman,
General William H. Draper Jr.,
President Lyndon Baines Johnson,
The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.,
source: PlannedParenthood.org
Good point.
And Hitler also presented Ford w/an award. Altho I don't know if he accepted it as happily as King mite have this....
Mid-Missouri Mental Health Center
John F. Higdon, Ph.D. (Southern Illinois University, 1972) is a Clinical Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Neurology, University of Missouri and serves as a psychologist on the General Psychiatry Unit of the Truman VA. His interests include cognitive behavioral therapies, esoteric therapies, post traumatic stress disorder, and paranoid, borderline, and dissociative disorders. Dr. Higdon is involved with overpopulation, reproductive rights issues, freedom of choice, separation of church and state, and environmental protection.
Sanger's central goal was to limit the reproductivity of inferiors (read blacks).....And some blacks think this was (is) a great idea???
actually, King was given the award for: for "his courageous resistance to bigotry and his lifelong dedication to the advancement of social justice and human dignity." ....this is as per. planned parenthood.
And in other historical news, the inmates of Auschwitz were awarded the presigious Adolf Hitler Award, presented by Nazi Spokeman Josef Goebbells.
...the Negro people parallel closely Mrs. Sanger's fight over the last half-century for the emancipation of women from the burdens of perpetual child-bearing and the emancipation of children from a future of poverty and hopelessness.
"overpopulation, reproductive rights issues, freedom of choice, separation of church and state, and environmental protection."
Gee, could he be.....a Democrat????
Abortion was, in fact, legal in a number of states in King's day and Planned Parenthood's long-standing goal was to make it legal in ALL states. They wouldn't have given King this award unless he fully supported their agenda, which has always included abortion on demand.
Support of abortion was completely consistent with King's debauched and degenerate lifestyle, which consisted of multiple adulteries and group sex - even according to his good friend J. Lowry as told in the later's book "And the Walls Came Tumbling Down." It's way past high time those who call themselves conservative stop buying into the mythical MLK that has been built up by the likes of the NY Times. He was a leftist and an apostate, nothing more - a tin god of the left. Jesse Jackson is his spiritual heir.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I know that King was not a moral guy, despite his talent for taking the moral high ground and effectively using scripture in speeches. I also know that he was quite the liberal. I just don't think that someone supporting "family planning" in the 1960s automatically equates to supporting abortion, although you make a good point about how PP likely wouldn't have celebrated him had he disagreed with them on abortion.
It's intersting how the Right get their panties all in a wad when the Left throws the bodies of Washington and Jefferson and others on the ash-heap of history because they were immoral slaveowners and how they fathered children outside of marriage and how washington might have smoked hemp etc.....yet some on the right find a way to totally discredit the likes of Martin Luther King jr. in a very similar manner.
I think its time to realize that great men also have flaws - and these flaws don't have to erase the greatness in a man.
.
(....and I don't think J. Jackson has proved himself an heir to anything commendable )
Yet another reason why this man did nothing to deserve a national holiday.... Reagan was a great president but this was a mistake of his....
it is still Lincoln's and Washington's birthdays to ME>.....
Margaret Sanger’s "Crusade" was FOR birthcontrol. Does anyone know if it was also for Abortion?
This was back in the pre-Roe days. I think a great many of the Mover/Shaker types were then Planned Parenthood fans, on the grounds that it was a forward-thinking organization. In fact, I seem to recall that the first President Bush was a Planned Parenthood supporter back then.
Even though Margret Sanger was a nutcase, Planned Parenhood as was not an abortion provider then. We can't judge PP by the same standards we judge it today.
And Alveda King said MLK was against abortion.
Did you mean something like this?
From the Planned Parenthood Mar Monte website:
“Our sure beginning in the struggle for equality by non-violent direct action may not have been so resolute without the tradition established by Margaret Sanger and people like her. There is scarcely anything more tragic in human life than a child who is not wanted.”
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his 1966 acceptance speech after receiving Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger award
The Margaret Sanger Award is presented annually to honor especially distinguished service in promoting family planning and advancing the principles of social justice for which Mrs. Sanger fought. In its first year, Martin Luther King was one of four recipients of the award. Through the years, other honorees have included John D. Rockefeller III, Alan Guttmacher, M.D., Katherine Hepburn and Phil Donahue.
Today, Planned Parenthood Mar Monte is proud to unite and take part in the Martin Luther King Jr. March and Food Drive to End Childhood Hunger in Fresno. Planned Parenthood’s mission and that of Martin Luther King have, and always will be, closely united.
Dr. King’s unceasing efforts closely parallel Mrs. Sanger’s fight for the emancipation of women from the burdens of perpetual child-bearing and the emancipation of children from a future of poverty and hopelessness. Neither Mrs. Sanger nor Dr. King hesitated to challenge unjust laws, cruel social customs and blind prejudice that hold people in ignorance and degradation. Our courts, our legislature and---most of all---the human heart and mind have been the crucible in which they have forged a nobler history for all mankind.
Or perhaps something more like this:
The Negro Project
Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Plan for Black Americans
By Tanya L. Green
posted at Concerned Women of America
May 10, 2001
“... I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live.”
—Deuteronomy 30:19 (NKJV)
On the crisp, sunny, fall Columbus Day in 1999, organizers of the “Say So” march approached the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court. The marchers, who were predominantly black pastors and lay persons, concluded their three-day protest at the site of two monumental cases: the school desegregation Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the pro-abortion Roe v. Wade (1973). The significance of each case—equal rights for all Americans in the former, and abortion “rights” in the latter—converged in the declaration of Rev. Johnny M. Hunter, the march's sponsor and national director of Life, Education and Resource Network (LEARN), the largest black pro-life organization.
“'Civil rights' doesn't mean anything without a right to life!” declared Hunter. He and the other marchers were protesting the disproportionately high number of abortions in the black community. The high number is no accident. Many Americans—black and white—are unaware of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger's Negro Project. Sanger created this program in 1939, after the organization changed its name from the American Birth Control League (ABCL) to the Birth Control Federation of America (BCFA).1
The aim of the program was to restrict—many believe exterminate—the black population. Under the pretense of “better health” and “family planning,” Sanger cleverly implemented her plan. What's more shocking is Sanger's beguilement of black America's crème de la crème—those prominent, well educated and well-to-do—into executing her scheme. Some within the black elite saw birth control as a means to attain economic empowerment, elevate the race and garner the respect of whites.
The Negro Project has had lasting repercussions in the black community: “We have become victims of genocide by our own hands,” cried Hunter at the “Say So” march.
Malthusian Eugenics
Margaret Sanger aligned herself with the eugenicists whose ideology prevailed in the early 20th century. Eugenicists strongly espoused racial supremacy and “purity,” particularly of the “Aryan” race. Eugenicists hoped to purify the bloodlines and improve the race by encouraging the “fit” to reproduce and the “unfit” to restrict their reproduction. They sought to contain the “inferior” races through segregation, sterilization, birth control and abortion.
Sanger embraced Malthusian eugenics. Thomas Robert Malthus, a 19th-century cleric and professor of political economy, believed a population time bomb threatened the existence of the human race.2 He viewed social problems such as poverty, deprivation and hunger as evidence of this “population crisis.” According to writer George Grant, Malthus condemned charities and other forms of benevolence, because he believed they only exacerbated the problems. His answer was to restrict population growth of certain groups of people.3 His theories of population growth and economic stability became the basis for national and international social policy. Grant quotes from Malthus' magnum opus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, published in six editions from 1798 to 1826:
All children born, beyond what would be required to keep up the population to a desired level, must necessarily perish, unless room is made for them by the deaths of grown persons. We should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavoring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality.4
Malthus' disciples believed if Western civilization were to survive, the physically unfit, the materially poor, the spiritually diseased, the racially inferior, and the mentally incompetent had to be suppressed and isolated—or even, perhaps, eliminated. His disciples felt the subtler and more “scientific” approaches of education, contraception, sterilization and abortion were more “practical and acceptable ways” to ease the pressures of the alleged overpopulation.5
Critics of Malthusianism said the group “produced a new vocabulary of mumbo-jumbo. It was all hard-headed, scientific and relentless.” Further, historical facts have proved the Malthusian mathematical scheme regarding overpopulation to be inaccurate, though many still believe them.6
Despite the falsehoods of Malthus' overpopulation claims, Sanger nonetheless immersed herself in Malthusian eugenics. Grant wrote she argued for birth control using the “scientifically verified” threat of poverty, sickness, racial tension and overpopulation as its background. Sanger's publication, The Birth Control Review (founded in 1917) regularly published pro-eugenic articles from eugenicists, such as Ernst Rudin.7 Although Sanger ceased editing The Birth Control Review in 1929, the ABCL continued to use it as a platform for eugenic ideas.
Sanger built the work of the ABCL, and, ultimately, Planned Parenthood, on the ideas and resources of the eugenics movement. Grant reported that “virtually all of the organization's board members were eugenicists.” Eugenicists financed the early projects, from the opening of birth control clinics to the publishing of “revolutionary” literature. Eugenicists comprised the speakers at conferences, authors of literature and the providers of services “almost without exception.” And Planned Parenthood's international work was originally housed in the offices of the Eugenics Society. The two organizations were intertwined for years.8
The ABCL became a legal entity on April 22, 1922, in New York. Before that, Sanger illegally operated a birth control clinic in October 1916, in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York, which eventually closed. The clinic serviced the poor immigrants who heavily populated the area—those deemed “unfit” to reproduce.9
Sanger's early writings clearly reflected Malthus' influence. She writes:
Organized charity itself is the symptom of a malignant social disease. Those vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to diminish the spread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils that spring out of this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents.10
In another passage, she decries the burden of “human waste” on society:
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
She concluded,
The most serious charge that can be brought against modern “benevolence” is that it encourages the perpetuation of defectives, delinquents and dependents. These are the most dangerous elements in the world community, the most devastating curse on human progress and expression.12
The Review printed an excerpt of an address Sanger gave in 1926. In it she said:
It now remains for the U.S. government to set a sensible example to the world by offering a bonus or yearly pension to all obviously unfit parents who allow themselves to be sterilized by harmless and scientific means. In this way the moron and the diseased would have no posterity to inherit their unhappy condition. The number of the feeble-minded would decrease and a heavy burden would be lifted from the shoulders of the fit.13
Sanger said a “bonus” would be “wise and profitable” and “the salvation of American civilization.”14 She presented her ideas to Mr. C. Harold Smith (of the New York Evening World) on “the welfare committee” in New York City. She said, “people must be helped to help themselves.” Any plan or program that would make them “dependent upon doles and charities” is “paternalistic” and would not be “of any permanent value.” She included an essay (what she called a “program of public welfare,”) entitled “We Must Breed a Race of Thoroughbreds.”15
In it she argued that birth control clinics, or bureaus, should be established “in which men and women will be taught the science of parenthood and the science of breeding.” For this was the way “to breed out of the race the scourges of transmissible disease, mental defect, poverty, lawlessness, crime ... since these classes would be decreasing in number instead of breeding like weeds [emphasis added].”16
Her program called for women to receive birth control advice in various situations, including where:
the woman or man had a “transmissible” disease such as insanity, feeble-mindedness, epilepsy, syphilis, etc.;
the children already born were “subnormal or feeble-minded”;
the father's wages were “inadequate ... to provide for more children.”
Sanger said “such a plan would ... reduce the birthrate among the diseased, the sickly, the poverty stricken and anti-social classes, elements unable to provide for themselves, and the burden of which we are all forced to carry.”17
Sanger had openly embraced Malthusian eugenics, and it shaped her actions in the ensuing years.
The Harlem Clinic
In 1929, 10 years before Sanger created the Negro Project, the ABCL laid the groundwork for a clinic in Harlem, a largely black section of New York City. It was the dawn of the Great Depression, and for blacks that meant double the misery. Blacks faced harsher conditions of desperation and privation because of widespread racial prejudice and discrimination. From the ABCL's perspective, Harlem was the ideal place for this “experimental clinic,” which officially opened on November 21, 1930. Many blacks looked to escape their adverse circumstances and therefore did not recognize the eugenic undercurrent of the clinic. The clinic relied on the generosity of private foundations to remain in business.18 In addition to being thought of as “inferior” and disproportionately represented in the underclass, according to the clinic's own files used to justify its “work,” blacks in Harlem:
were segregated in an over-populated area (224,760 of 330,000 of greater New York's black population lived in Harlem during the late 1920s and 1930s);
comprised 12 percent of New York City's population, but accounted for 18.4 percent of New York City's unemployment;
had an infant mortality rate of 101 per 1000 births, compared to 56 among whites;
had a death rate from tuberculosis—237 per 100,000—that was highest in central Harlem, out of all of New York City.19
Although the clinic served whites as well as blacks, it “was established for the benefit of the colored people.” Sanger wrote this in a letter to Dr. W. E. Burghardt DuBois,20 one of the day's most influential blacks. A sociologist and author, he helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 to improve the living conditions of black Americans.
That blacks endured extreme prejudice and discrimination, which contributed greatly to their plight, seemed to further justify restricting their numbers. Many believed the solution lay in reducing reproduction. Sanger suggested the answer to poverty and degradation lay in smaller numbers of blacks. She convinced black civic groups in Harlem of the “benefits” of birth control, under the cloak of “better health” (i.e., reduction of maternal and infant death; child spacing) and “family planning.” So with their cooperation, and the endorsement of The Amsterdam News (a prominent black newspaper), Sanger established the Harlem branch of the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau.21 The ABCL told the community birth control was the answer to their predicament.
Sanger shrewdly used the influence of prominent blacks to reach the masses with this message. She invited DuBois and a host of Harlem's leading blacks, including physicians, social workers, ministers and journalists, to form an advisory council to help direct the clinic “so that our work in birth control will be a constructive force in the community.”22 She knew the importance of having black professionals on the advisory board and in the clinic; she knew blacks would instinctively suspect whites of wanting to decrease their numbers. She would later use this knowledge to implement the Negro Project.
Sanger convinced the community so well that Harlem's largest black church, the Abyssinian Baptist Church, held a mass meeting featuring Sanger as the speaker.23 But that event received criticism. At least one “very prominent minister of a denomination other than Baptist” spoke out against Sanger. Dr. Adam Clayton Powell Sr., pastor of Abyssinian Baptist, “received adverse criticism” from the (unnamed) minister who was “surprised that he'd allow that awful woman in his church.”24
Grace Congregational Church hosted a debate on birth control. Proponents argued birth control was necessary to regulate births in proportion to the family's income; spacing births would help mothers recover physically and fathers financially; physically strong and mentally sound babies would result; and incidences of communicable diseases would decrease.
Opponents contended that as a minority group blacks needed to increase rather than decrease and that they needed an equal distribution of wealth to improve their status. In the end, the debate judges decided the proponents were more persuasive: Birth control would improve the status of blacks.25 Still, there were others who equated birth control with abortion and therefore considered it immoral.
Eventually, the Urban League took control of the clinic,26 an indication the black community had become ensnared in Sanger's labyrinth.
Birth Control as a Solution
The Harlem clinic and ensuing birth control debate opened dialogue among blacks about how best to improve their disadvantageous position. Some viewed birth control as a viable solution: High reproduction, they believed, meant prolonged poverty and degradation. Desperate for change, others began to accept the “rationale” of birth control. A few embraced eugenics. The June 1932 edition of The Birth Control Review, called “The Negro Number,” featured a series of articles written by blacks on the “virtues” of birth control.
The editorial posed this question: “Shall they go in for quantity or quality in children? Shall they bring children into the world to enrich the undertakers, the physicians and furnish work for social workers and jailers, or shall they produce children who are going to be an asset to the group and American society?” The answer: “Most [blacks], especially women, would choose quality ... if they only knew how.”27
DuBois, in his article “Black Folk and Birth Control,” noted the “inevitable clash of ideals between those Negroes who were striving to improve their economic position and those whose religious faith made the limitation of children a sin.”28 He criticized the “mass of ignorant Negroes” who bred “carelessly and disastrously so that the increase among [them] ... is from that part of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear their children properly.”29
DuBois called for a “more liberal attitude” among black churches. He said they were open to “intelligent propaganda of any sort, and the American Birth Control League and other agencies ought to get their speakers before church congregations and their arguments in the Negro newspapers [emphasis added].”30
Charles S. Johnson, Fisk University's first black president, wrote “eugenic discrimination” was necessary for blacks.31 He said the high maternal and infant mortality rates, along with diseases like tuberculosis, typhoid, malaria and venereal infection, made it difficult for large families to adequately sustain themselves.
Further, “the status of Negroes as marginal workers, their confinement to the lowest paid branches of industry, the necessity for the labors of mothers, as well as children, to balance meager budgets, are factors [that] emphasize the need for lessening the burden not only for themselves, but of society, which must provide the supplementary support in the form of relief.”32 Johnson later served on the National Advisory Council to the BCFA, becoming integral to the Negro Project.
Writer Walter A. Terpenning described bringing a black child into a hostile world as “pathetic.” In his article “God's Chillun,” he wrote:
The birth of a colored child, even to parents who can give it adequate support, is pathetic in view of the unchristian and undemocratic treatment likely to be accorded it at the hands of a predominantly white community, and the denial of choice in propagation to this unfortunate class is nothing less than barbarous [emphasis added].33
Terpenning considered birth control for blacks as “the more humane provision” and “more eugenic” than among whites. He felt birth control information should have first been disseminated among blacks rather than the white upper crust.34 He failed to look at the problematic attitudes and behavior of society and how they suppressed blacks. He offered no solutions to the injustice and vile racism that blacks endured.
Sadly, DuBois' words of black churches being “open to intelligent propaganda” proved prophetic. Black pastors invited Sanger to speak to their congregations. Black publications, like The Afro-American and The Chicago Defender, featured her writings. Rather than attacking the root causes of maternal and infant deaths, diseases, poverty, unemployment and a host of other social ills—not the least of which was racism—Sanger pushed birth control. To many, it was better for blacks not to be born rather than endure such a harsh existence.
Against this setting, Sanger charmed the black community's most distinguished leaders into accepting her plan, which was designed to their own detriment. She peddled her wares wrapped in pretty packages labeled “better health” and “family planning.” No one could deny the benefits of better health, being financially ready to raise children, or spacing one's children. However, the solution to the real issues affecting blacks did not lay in reducing their numbers. It lay in attacking the forces in society that hindered their progress. Most importantly, one had to discern Sanger's motive behind her push for birth control in the community. It was not an altruistic one.
Web of Deceit
Prior to 1939, Sanger's “outreach to the black community was largely limited to her Harlem clinic and speaking at black churches.”35 Her vision for “the reproductive practices of black Americans” expanded after the January 1939 merger of the Clinical Research Bureau and the American Birth Control League to form the Birth Control Federation of America. She selected Dr. Clarence J. Gamble, of the soap-manufacturing company Procter and Gamble, to be the BCFA regional director of the South.
Gamble wrote a memorandum in November 1939 entitled “Suggestions for the Negro Project,” in which he recognized that “black leaders might regard birth control as an extermination plot.” He suggested black leaders be placed in positions where it would appear they were in charge.36 Yet Sanger's reply reflects Gamble's ambivalence about having blacks in authoritative positions:
I note that you doubt it worthwhile to employ a full-time Negro physician. It seems to me from my experience ... that, while the colored Negroes have great respect for white doctors, they can get closer to their own members and more or less lay their cards on the table, which means their ignorance, superstitions and doubts. They do not do this with white people and if we can train the Negro doctor at the clinic, he can go among them with enthusiasm and ... knowledge, which ... will have far-reaching results among the colored people.37
Another project director lamented:
I wonder if Southern Darkies can ever be entrusted with ... a clinic. Our experience causes us to doubt their ability to work except under white supervision.38
Sanger knew blacks were a religious people—and how useful ministers would be to her project. She wrote in the same letter:
The minister's work is also important and he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. We do not want 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 [emphasis added].39
Sanger's cohorts within the BCFA sought to attract black leadership. They succeeded. The list of black leaders who made up BCFA's National Advisory Council reads like a “who's who” among black Americans. To name a few:40
Claude A. Barnett, director, Associated Negro Press, Chicago
Michael J. Bent, M.D., Meharry Medical School, Nashville
Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, president, National Council of Negro Women, Washington, D.C., special advisor to President Roosevelt on minority groups, and founder of Bethune-Cookman College, Daytona Beach
Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee, cum laude graduate of Tufts, president of Alpha Kappa Alpha (the nation's oldest black sorority), Washington, D.C.
Charles S. Johnson, president, Fisk University, Nashville
Eugene Kinckle Jones, executive secretary, National Urban League, New York
Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., pastor, Abyssinian Baptist Church, New York
Bishop David H. Sims, pastor, African Methodist Episcopal Church, Philadelphia
Arthur Spingarn, president, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
Even with this impressive list, Sanger ran into resistance when she tried to present a birth control exhibit at the 1940 American Negro Exposition, a fair that traces the progress blacks have made since the Emancipation Proclamation, in Chicago. After inviting the BCFA to display its exhibit, the Exposition's board later cancelled, citing “last minute changes in floor space.”41
Sanger did not buy this and issued a statement urging public protest. “This has come as a complete surprise,” said Sanger, “since the Federation undertook preparation of the exhibit upon an express invitation from a member of the Exposition board.”42 She said the cancellation resulted from “concerted action on the part of representatives of the Roman Catholic Church.” She even accused the church of threatening officials with the withholding of promised federal and state funds needed to hold the Exposition.43
Her statement mentioned BCFA prepared the exhibit in consultation with its National (Negro) Advisory Council, and it illustrated “the need for birth control as a public health measure.”44 She said the objective was to demonstrate how birth control would “improve the welfare of the Negro population,” noting the maternal death rate among black mothers was nearly 50 percent higher, and the child death rate was more than one-third greater than the white community.45
At Sanger's urging, protesters of the cancellation sent letters to Attorney Wendall E. Green, vice chairman of the Afra-Merican Emancipation Exposition Commission (sponsor of the Exposition), requesting he investigate. Green denied there was any threat or pressure to withhold funds needed to finance the Exposition. Further, he said the Exposition commission (of Illinois) “unanimously passed a resolution,” which read in part: “That in the promotion, conduct and accomplishment of the objectives (of the Exposition) there must be an abiding spirit to create goodwill toward all people.”46 He added that since the funds for the Exposition “came from citizens of all races and creeds, any exhibit in conflict with the known convictions of any religious group contravenes the spirit of the resolution,”47 which seemed to support Catholic opposition. The commission upheld the ban on the exhibit.
...Excerpted from a longer article.
Seems to me a pretty clear and unambiguous connection, unfortunately. Specifically targeted black/underclass genocide - paid for by tax dollars, charitable grants, and church contributions, with the blessing of prominent black church members/leaders who had been sold the most evil of lies
A.A.C.
Thanks for the post. How ugly! Certainly the black liberal "church" members/leaders mentioned represent something other than God's moral will. Obviously something came first in their heart before God when they made those choices.
I note that you have not refuted my assertion that King's support of abortion was completely consistent with his depraved lifestyle. (Just as it is with Bill Clinton and Jesse Jackson). Instead, you resort to the "flawed great man" argument that is so prevalent among the left.
What did King accomplish that made him so great? He gave a speech in 1963 with great sounding words - "a person should be judged by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin", which inspired many people to work to abolish the discrimination against Black Americans that was present in parts of the United States.
Assuming he was even the real author of this speech - some have pointed out that much of it was plagarized from the speech of a black minister at the 1956 Republican convention - let's do just what he suggests:
Here we have a man who made a vow before God to be faithful to his wife - not only as a husband but as a minister of the Gospel (an example to the faithful and the world). He utterly disregarded and disgraced the vow he made with no evidence of repentance. Not once, but repeatedly - for years on end. He ultimately sided with the leftist mainline "Protestant" interpretation of scripture - that it's all a myth and ultimately supports leftism anyway (the social gospel). It's fine to sleep around all you like, as long as you believe in "social justice." What does this tell you about the content of his character?
Moreover, despite a profession of Christianity, he openly sided with and praised Communists, who are a) atheists; and b) sluaghtered millions of his fellow Christians; and c) slaughtered over one hundred million people worldwide since 1917 for the crime of disagreeing with them. King's chief advisor was Stanley Levinson, a cadre in the Communist Part of the USA, whose goal was the destruction of the United States. He also openly praised the thug Fidel Castro, directly responsible for the murder of thousands of Christians in Cuba, and for imprisoning the black Cuban (and Christian) Dr. Oscar Biscet. Worse, this alleged Christian - a minister no less - openly supported abortion and received an award from an organization devoted to abortion despite 1900 years of unequivocal apostolic church teaching on the issue of abortion - an abominable slaughter of innocents. What does this tell you about the content of Washington's character?
Also, despite such classically-liberal sounding phrases (the content of one's character instead of color of one's skin), King openly supported racial preferences, which weren't given the Orwellian term "affirmative action" until after his death - this is an complete refutation of his own stated principles. Again, what thoes this tell you about the content of his character?
Let's contrast this with Washington the slave-owner, since you brought it up. Slavery was practiced from the beginning of time, and continues to be practiced to this very day in Africa and in the Islamic world. It is actually specifically mentioned in scripture, in contrast to abortion. It is not actually condemned ipso facto in scripture, which contains admonishments to slave-owners to treat their slaves decently. Even so, most reliable interpretations of scripture and tradition regard the practice with much suspicion and take the view that it is best not practiced as it almost always leads to sin. The only thing remarkable about slavery, as Thomas Sowell mentioned recently, was the movement in the parts of the Christian West (England and America, specifically) to abolish the practice. This movement was making waves even as early as Washington's time. Washington evidently had enough misgivings about the morality of slavery to cause him to free the slaves under his personal control at his death in 1799. Not even to menton the small detail that he put his own life on the line in breaking with England to found this country. (King was born in 1925. He could have signed up for the military in 1943 when he was 18 since we were at war against the Nazis and Imperial Japan. Maybe he was too busy sleeping around with married women in the congregation to bother.) What does that tell us about the content of his character?
King was not a "flawed great man." He was a fraud and an evildoer. The myth created by his fellow leftists in the media continues the lie, and even obscures the Black minister who penned the eloquent words seven years before King's repetition (without credit) in a staged media event. He's the real hero. Want another Black Anerican who deserves recognition as a great American in the best tradtion? Try Frederick Douglass. Time to stop swallowing Marxist mythology. It is a sad commentary on present-day America that a Marxist like King has a holiday devoted to solely him while Washington and Lincoln (actual flawed great men) are lumped together into "President's Day." (Which will no doubt be devoted in future decades to the memory of Bill Clinton's great 'accomplishments' absent some real repentance in this country.)
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Moreover, despite a profession of Christianity, he openly sided with and praised Communists, who are a) atheists; and b) sluaghtered millions of his fellow Christians; and c) slaughtered over one hundred million people worldwide since 1917 for the crime of disagreeing with them. King's chief advisor was Stanley Levinson, a cadre in the Communist Part of the USA, whose goal was the destruction of the United States. He also openly praised the thug Fidel Castro, directly responsible for the murder of thousands of Christians in Cuba, and for imprisoning the black Cuban (and Christian) Dr. Oscar Biscet. Worse, this alleged Christian - a minister no less - openly supported abortion and received an award from an organization devoted to abortion despite 1900 years of unequivocal apostolic church teaching on the issue of abortion - an abominable slaughter of innocents. What does this tell you about the content of his character?
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Let's contrast this with Washington the slave-owner, since you brought it up. Slavery was practiced from the beginning of time, and continues to be practiced to this very day in Africa and in the Islamic world. It is actually specifically mentioned in scripture, in contrast to abortion. It is not actually condemned ipso facto in scripture, which contains admonishments to slave-owners to treat their slaves decently. Even so, most reliable interpretations of scripture and tradition regard the practice with much suspicion and take the view that it is best not practiced as it almost always leads to sin. The only thing remarkable about slavery, as Thomas Sowell mentioned recently, was the movement in the parts of the Christian West (England and America, specifically) to abolish the practice. This movement was making waves even as early as Washington's time. Washington evidently had enough misgivings about the morality of slavery to cause him to free the slaves under his personal control at his death in 1799. Not even to menton the small detail that he put his own life on the line in breaking with England to found this country. (King was born in 1925. He could have signed up for the military in 1943 when he was 18 since we were at war against the Nazis and Imperial Japan. Maybe he was too busy sleeping around with married women in the congregation to bother.) What does that tell us about the content of Washington's character?
he was the figurehead of of an important movement/event in American history - and since I recognize the civil rights movement in the 60s as a good and noble turning point, then I will choose to honor the movement and its mouthpiece by calling them "good", inspite of their significant flaws - which you have taken great care to point out.
Oh thank you, thank you for talking some on Washington. Nobody disses my George!
And let me add - George was so "moral", he declined absolute power or even the hint of it. The idea bandied about for a US king (and he was often the choice), and the fact he thought it arrogant and dangerous to be president too long.
All you can "pin" on George is slavery. The ONLY thing. And he gave them up on his wife's death (not HIS death, incidentally).
I myself don't profess to really know much about King. I've heard both great and horrible. I haven't read anything "scholarly", only hearsay like this. Well, maybe closest to that something like a few published columns.
As for other great blacks in America, what about Booker T W? And his associate George W. Carver? (Wow, note they all have "Washington" in their names....George was named specifically for him - by his adoptive parents.) What about Benjamin Banneker, a smart guy from my own backyard? I'm sure there are more who lived in tougher times than King.
Amen to your remarks about Booker T. Washington and G. W. Carver, both outstanding men whose legacy of excellence in the face of discrimination is all too often forgotten these days.
Frankly, I admire these men who carried on through discrimination to do USEFUL things. Maybe it's cuz I'm an engineer; I don't know. I just like that WHILE they fought discrimination, they actually CONTRIBUTED to everyone's lives, generally.
For those of you who were as opposed to abortion in 1967 as you are today, congratulations!
But the cause will not prevail until your former enemies are converted to your point of view. This is happening today.
I very much doubt that Dr, King, were he alive, would espouse the views on abortion that he held when he died.
Thanks for the post. Indeed you are right. Thats why conservatives and pro-lifers need to think twice before elevating MLK to Sainthood and pathetically trying to claim him as our own.
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