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MSPP / Newsletter / Newsletter #28 (Fall 2001) 

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Newsletter #28 (Fall 2001) 

"Birth Control or Race Control? Sanger and the
Negro Project" 

The Negro Project, instigated in 1939 by Margaret Sanger, was one of the first major 

undertakings of the new Birth Control Federation of America (BCFA), the product of a 

merger between the American Birth Control League and Sanger's Birth Control Clinical 

Research Bureau, and one of the more controversial campaigns of the birth control 

movement. Developed by white birth control reformers, who consulted with African-

Americans for help in promoting the project only well after its inception, the Negro 

Project and associated campaigns were, nevertheless, widely supported by such black 

leaders as Mary McLeod Bethune, W. E. B. DuBois, and Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. 

Influenced strongly by both the eugenics movement and the progressive welfare 

programs of the New Deal era, the Negro Project was, from the start, largely indifferent 

to the needs of the black community and constructed in terms and with perceptions that 
today smack of racism. 

What it became was not the project Sanger had first envisioned. As she wrote in an 

initial fund-raising request to Albert Lasker, the wealthy advertising executive just 
beginning his post-business career in medical philanthropy, she simply hoped to help "a 

group notoriously underprivileged and handicapped to a large measure by a ‘caste' 
system that operates as an added weight upon their efforts to get a fair share of the 

better things in life. To give them the means of helping themselves is perhaps the richest 
gift of all. We believe birth control knowledge brought to this group, is the most direct, 
constructive aid that can be given them to improve their immediate situation." Sanger 
viewed the Negro Project as another effort to help African-Americans gain better access 
to safe contraception and maintain birth control services in their community as she had 
attempted to do in Harlem a decade earlier when Sanger's Birth Control Clinical 
Research Bureau (BCCRB), in cooperation with the New York Urban League, opened a 
birth control clinic there. (MS to Lasker, July 10, 1939, Mary Lasker Papers, Columbia 
University (to be microfilmed in a later addendum to the MSM) 

http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/articles/bc_or_race_control.php