Appearing in Boston last night, Ben Carson said that Margaret Sanger, the founder of the women’s health organization now known as Planned Parenthood, wanted to “eradicate” the black race. “She believed that people like me should be eliminated or kept under control. So, I’m not real fond of her to be honest or anything that she established.”
Fortunately, some of the great leaders in American history, who also happen to be African American, disagreed. As Stated in WikiPedia:
She collaborated with African-American leaders and professionals who saw a need for birth control in their communities. In 1929, James H. Hubert, a black social worker and leader of New York’s Urban League, asked Sanger to open a clinic in Harlem. Sanger secured funding from the Julius Rosenwald Fund and opened the clinic, staffed with black doctors, in 1930. The clinic was directed by a 15-member advisory board consisting of black doctors, nurses, clergy, journalists, and social workers. The clinic was publicized in the African-American press and in black churches, and it received the approval of W. E. B. Du Bois, founder of the NAACP. Sanger did not tolerate bigotry among her staff, nor would she tolerate any refusal to work within interracial projects. Sanger’s work with minorities earned praise from Martin Luther King, Jr., in his 1966 acceptance speech for the Margaret Sanger award. From 1939 to 1942 Sanger was an honorary delegate of the Birth Control Federation of America, which included a supervisory role—alongside Mary Lasker and Clarence Gamble—in the Negro Project, an effort to deliver birth control to poor black people. Sanger wanted the Negro Project to include black ministers in leadership roles, but other supervisors did not.
For more on this story, click Boston Globe Carson draws laughs, gasps in N.H.
