Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/URLs_Cited/OT2018/18-483/18-483-1.pdf
Page Number: 2.0

MSPP / Newsletter / Newsletter #28 (Fall 2001) 

By the late 1930s, the birth control activists began to focus on high birth rates and poor 

quality of life in the South, alerted to alarming Southern poverty by a 1938 U.S. National 

Resource Committee report which asserted that Southern poverty drained resources 

from other parts of the country. Starting in the mid-1930s, Sanger sent field workers into 

the rural South to establish birth control services in poor communities and conduct 

research. She sought to test various contraceptive jellies and foam powders to see if 

they could effectively be used without a diaphragm, which would be cheaper and easier 

for poor women to use. Physician and philanthropist Clarence Gamble (1894-1966), who 

was on a quest to find the best birth control for the "uneducated masses," funded and 

supervised several of these rural Southern projects. The birth control movement also 

looked to Southern states as the ideal region in which to secure funding under New Deal 

legislation and to establish birth control services as part of state and federal public health 

programs. These birth control initiatives were designed, in part, to demonstrate to 

government bureaucrats on the county, state and federal levels that contraceptive clinics 

were essential in impoverished Southern communities and could be successfully 

duplicated in other regions. 

In 1937, North Carolina became the first state to incorporate birth control services into a 

statewide public health program, followed by six other southern states. However, these 

successes were clouded by the failure of birth controllers to overcome segregated health 
services and improve African-Americans' access to contraceptives. Hazel Moore, a 

veteran lobbyist and health administrator, ran a birth control project under Sanger's 

direction and found that black women in several Virginia counties were very responsive 

to birth control education. A 1938 trip to Tennessee further convinced Sanger of the 

desire of African-Americans in that region to control their fertility and the need for 

specific programs in birth control education aimed at the black community. (Hazel 

Moore, "Birth Control for the Negro," 1937, Sophia Smith Collection, Florence Rose 

Papers.) 

In 1939 Sanger teamed with Mary Woodward Reinhardt, secretary of the newly formed 

BCFA, to secure a large donor to fund an educational campaign to teach African-

American women in the South about contraception. Sanger, Reinhardt and Sanger's 

secretary, Florence Rose, drafted a report on "Birth Control and the Negro," skillfully 

using language that appealed both to eugenicists fearful of unchecked black fertility and 

progressives committed to shepherding African-Americans into middle-class culture. The 

report stated that "[N]egroes present the great problem of the South," as they are the 

group with "the greatest economic, health and social problems," and outlined a practical 

birth control program geared toward a population characterized as largely illiterate and 

that "still breed carelessly and disastrously," a line borrowed from a June 1932 Birth 

Control Review article by W.E.B. DuBois. Armed with this paper, Reinhardt initiated 

contact between Sanger and Albert Lasker (soon to be Reinhardt's husband), who 

pledged $20,000 starting in Nov. 1939. ("Birth Control and the Negro," July 1939, Lasker 

Papers) 

However, once funding was secured, the project slipped from Sanger's hands. She had 
proposed that the money go to train "an up and doing modern minister, colored, and an 

up and doing modern colored medical man" at her New York clinic who would then tour 
"as many Southern cities and organizations and churches and medical societies as they 

can get before" and "preach and preach and preach!" She believed that after a year of 
such "educational agitation" the Federation could support a "practical campaign for 

supplying mothers with contraceptives." Before going in and establishing clinics, Sanger 
thought it critical to gain the support and involvement of the African-American community 
(not just its leaders) and establish a foundation of trust. Her proposal derived from the 
work of activists in the field, discussions with black leaders and her experience with the 
New York clinics. Sanger understood the concerns of some within the black community 
about having Northern whites intervene in the most intimate aspect of their lives. "I do 
not believe" she warned, "that this project should be directed or run by white medical 
men. The Federation should direct it with the guidance and assistance of the colored 
group &ndash; perhaps, particularly and specifically formed for the purpose." To 

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