Marching for life and against the "Negro Project"

On January 8, 2006, I attended the Justice Sunday III conference at Greater Exodus Baptist Church, a predominantly black church in Philadelphia. Reverend Herbert Lusk preached passionately against abortion and called it murder. Today, I will attend the Blogs4Life Conference, then head to the National Mall for the March for Life rally. I hope to see a large number of the kind of people who nodded in agreement with Rev. Lusk’s sermon.

Black women are three times as likely to have abortions as their white counterparts. Blacks and Hispanics are about 25 percent of the population, yet they account for 57 percent of all abortions. Aside from the fact that abortion is murder, there are two very important reasons why black people should be represented in great numbers at the March for Life rally:

The Planned Parenthood Federation of America makes a futile effort to deny that its founder Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist. Eugenics is a pseudo-science that claims some races are genetically superior and more fit to survive than others. As a eugenicist, Sanger’s goals were to discourage the “unfit” and “inferior” from reproducing. In her 1922 book Pivot of Civilization, she called for segregation of “morons, misfits, and the maladjusted” and sterilization of “genetically inferior races.”

Sanger even suggested that the federal government pay “obviously unfit parents” not to have children and advocated limiting and discouraging “overfertility of the mentally and physically defective.”

In 1916, Sanger founded the Birth Control League, the forerunner of Planned Parenthood. She appointed a man named Lothrop Stoddard, a Nazi sympathizer, fellow eugenicist and author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy to the Board of Directors. At some point, after Adolph Hitler’s atrocities against the Jews became known, Sanger changed the league’s name to Planned Parenthood, because “birth control” was too closely associated with eugenics.

More controversial is Sanger’s “Negro Project,” devised in 1939. The eugenicist set out to implicate black ministers and doctors in her efforts to spread her message of contraception, sterilization, and abortion in the black community. “The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We do not want the word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it occurs to any of their more rebellious members,” she wrote.

People in poorer areas, particularly the South, were producing “alarmingly more than their share” of babies. Sanger was able to enlist black men such as W.E.B. Dubois and Dr. Adam Clayton Powell (a minister) to her cause. Even Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., had a part to play. In 1966, he received an award from Planned Parenthood, writing, “There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger’s early efforts.”

Margaret Sanger’s project worked better than she could have hoped. Not only do black women have abortions at higher rates, a solid 90 percent of black voters shamelessly cast ballots for the Democratic Party, an unabashed supporter of Planned Parenthood.

The Cybercast News Service compared the location of Planned Parenthood abortion clinics with population figures from the 2000 Census:

“In nearly two-thirds (62.5 percent) of the comparisons, the communities with a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic had a higher percentage of blacks than the state did as a whole.

In Delaware, Florida, Massachusetts and Ohio, the communities containing all of the Planned Parenthood abortion clinics had much higher black populations than their respective states, while Idaho, Kentucky, North Dakota, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming -- all of which have low black populations -- have none of the organization’s abortion facilities.

Two states with high black populations -- Louisiana (32.5 percent) and Mississippi (36.3 percent) -- also have no Planned Parenthood abortion clinics, due in large part to the strength of pro-life forces in that part of the nation and state laws that restrict access to abortion, according to Jim Sedlak, executive director of STOPP International.”

Even after her death, Sanger’s Negro Project lives on. Black ministers and so-called civil rights organizations that support Planned Parenthood ensure that minority women remain targets. Carlton W. Veazey is a minister, supporter of Planned Parenthood, and president and CEO of an organization once called the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights, now disguised as the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC).

Veazey founded a program called the Black Church Initiative, purportedly in response to the high pregnancy rate among black teens. According to RCRC’s web site, the initiative “encourages and assists African American clergy and laity in addressing teen childbearing, sexuality education, unintended pregnancies, and other reproductive health issues within the context of African American culture and religion.”

For the first time in its 95-year history, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which once fought to protect black lives, took an official position in favor of abortion in 2004.

While black liberals and so-called men of God continue to align themselves with Margaret Sanger’s “offspring,” I intend to campaign for the protection of all unborn babies, no matter what race or genetic inheritance.

Don't be stunned it was kept under wraps. You know we're only given the news the left thinks we need. Read the first sentence of the Southern Studies report and weep. Timing is everything for the left. When they're screaming in one direction, we need to look in the other.

http://www.uiowa.edu/~ournews/2003/march/032503schoen-eugenics-prog.html

www.southernstudies.org/reports/ELLISTON.pdf
Eugenics in North Carolina Thousands Were Sterilized by the State By Jon Elliston Southern Exposure 31.1 (Spring 2003)

The furor over Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott’s remarks praising Strom Thurmond’s segregationist presidential bid reminded Southerners that shadows still linger from decades of white supremacy and Jim Crow. So it was fitting that last December, when Lott was on the hot seat, a little sunlight seeped into one of the darkest corners of North Carolina’s history. A five-day Winston-Salem Journal series, “Against Their Will: North Carolina’s Sterilization Programs,” provided the first in-depth account of the state’s eugenics efforts—targeting mostly the poor and people of color—and of the terrible toll, in the form of stunted lives, that those efforts wrought.

The numbers reported in the Journal articles begin to tell the story. Between 1929 and 1974, state government eugenics boards authorized the surgical sterilization of more than 7,600 North Carolinians deemed to be “feebleminded,” “moronic,” “delinquent,” or “promiscuous,” as the administrative papers put it. More than 2,000 of the victims were under age 18. Ninety-nine percent were women. Tellingly, as the civil rights movement gathered steam in the 1960s, the sterilizations, which already disproportionately targeted African Americans, were increasingly meted out against young blacks.

North Carolina, the series reveals, was a hot-bed of private and public support for such so-called “human betterment.” After California and Virginia, the state conducted the third highest number of sterilizations in the country. Enthusiasm for eugenics—even following the disclosure of the Nazis’ horrific endeavors in the field—ran high in the South after World War II. Economic elites, civic leaders, and social scientists saw an aggressive sterilization program as a means to “improve the race” while shrinking the welfare roles and reducing the black population along the way.

The newspaper series goes beyond the numbers and logistics, sharing testimony from several living victims as well as some of the retired doctors, social workers, and state officials who had a hand in authorizing and promoting the practice. The lasting pain left by social engineering run amuck is evidenced by stories like that of Elaine Riddick Jessie, who was an Edenton 14-year-old when she gave birth to her only child in 1968. Hours after she gave birth, a doctor “tied her tubes” on orders of the state. “It is the most degrading thing, the most humiliating thing a person can do to a person is to take away a God-given right,” Jessie told the Journal.

The revelations in the Journal prompted a long-overdue mea culpa. “On behalf of the state I deeply apologize to the victims and their families for this past injustice, and for the pain and suffering they had to endure over the years,” Gov. Mike Easley said December 12. “This is a sad and regrettable chapter in the state's history, and it must be one that is never repeated again.”

Apologies are a good start, civil rights and mental health advocates say. But, as North Carolina NAACP director Skip Alston has argued, some form of restitution for the surviving victims—perhaps reparations—will now be expected. Alston is pushing for the state legislature to hold hearings on the matter, and says the NAACP will hold its own public hearings around the state.

And there’s at least one additional significant step the state can make to come clean on what was long a dirty secret: tell the whole story by publicly releasing the files of the eugenics program. According to the state archives in Raleigh, an estimated 50 cubic feet of records on the programremain under official seal. While state and federal laws forbid disclosing the personal data in the files, such information could be redacted from the documents prior to release, opening up a valuable historical resource and promoting greater accountability.

Meanwhile, other states are also beginning to take a hard look at their former eugenics programs. On January 9, South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges issued the state’s first apology for its program, which led to the sterilization of more than 250 people—again, most of them poor African Americans. A week earlier, the Disabled Action Committee, a national advocacy group, launched a campaign to urge President Bush to apologize for the federal government’s involvement in eugenics programs, which existed in at least 33 states and sterilized an estimated 65,000 people.

The Winston-Salem Journal series may be found online at http://againsttheirwill.journalnow.com.

Jon Elliston is a writer based in Chapel Hill, N.C.

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