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MSPP / Newsletter / Newsletter #28 (Fall 2001) 

succeed, she wrote, "It takes a very strong heart and an individual well entrenched in the 
community. . . ." (MS to Gamble, Nov. 26, 1939, and MS to Robert Seibels, Feb. 12, 

1940 [MSM S17:514, 891].) 

Sanger reiterated the need for black ministers to head up the project in a letter to 

Clarence Gamble in Dec. 1939, arguing that: "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." This passage has 

been repeatedly extracted by Sanger's detractors as evidence that she led a calculated 

effort to reduce the black population against their will. From African-American activist 

Angela Davis on the left to conservative commentator Dinesh D'Souza on the right, this 

statement alone has condemned Sanger to a perpetual waltz with Hitler and the KKK. 

Davis quoted the incendiary passage in her 1983 Women, Race and Class, claiming that 

the Negro Project "confirmed the ideological victory of the racism associated with 

eugenic ideas." D'Souza used the quote to buttress erroneous claims that Sanger called 

blacks "human weeds" and a "menace to civilization" in his best-selling 1995 book The 

End of Racism. The argument that Sanger co-opted black clergy and community leaders 

to exterminate their own race not only gives Sanger unwarranted credit as a remarkably 

cunning manipulator, but also suggests that African-Americans were passive receptors 

of birth control reform, incapable of making their own decisions about family size; and 

that black leaders were ignorant and gullible. 

In the end, Sanger's plan for an educational campaign to precede the demonstration 

project lost out to the white medical and public relations men running the new 

Federation. They were particularly swayed by Robert Seibels (1890-1955), chairman of 

the Committee on Maternal Welfare of the South Carolina Medical Association, who was 

chosen by the BCFA to direct a Negro demonstration project in that state. Seibels 

distrusted Sanger and her loyal crew of field workers, calling them "dried-up female 

fanatics" who had the gall to tell doctors what to do. Robert E. Seibels to Frederick C. 

Holden, Jan. 28, 1939, Sophia Smith Collection, Records of PPFA.) He saw no need for 

prerequisite education and propaganda and advised incorporating birth control services 

for blacks into a general public health program. The BCFA then dismissed the notion of 

building a community-based, black-staffed demonstration clinic that could become 

permanent, and instead set in motion a plan that closely resembled the vaccination and 

VD caravans that swept in and out of the region. 

Lasker's money was used to set up demonstration projects between 1940 and 1942 in 

several rural South Carolina counties, under Seibels's direction, and in urban Nashville, 

TN under the auspices of the Nashville City Health Department. In South Carolina, the 

BCFA hired two African-American nurses to make house calls and meet with women in 

groups at schools and community centers to encourage them to visit a clinic, but 

contraceptives were dispensed by white doctors only. In Nashville, demonstration clinics 

were opened at the Bethlehem Center, a black settlement house, and later at Fisk 

University, and black nurses were eventually employed with some success there as well. 

The Federation immediately claimed that the Negro Project had exceeded its 
expectations and even persuaded Life Magazine to carry a photo spread of the 

demonstration clinics in South Carolina in May 1940. But relatively few women, (only 
about 3,000) visited the demonstration clinics to receive contraceptive instruction. And 

among those that did, the dropout rates were high as many women would not return to 
white doctors for follow-up exams, though the black nurses in both Nashville and South 

Carolina met with greater success. In 1942 the Federation ended funding for the 
demonstration clinics claiming to have developed "workable procedures" for providing 
contraception to African-Americans in both rural and urban communities; but no other 
clinics appear to have opened as a result of the Project. ("Better Health for 13,000,000," 
PPFA Report, April 16, 1943, Rose Papers; John Overton, "A Birth Control Service 
Among Urban Negroes," Human Fertility, Aug. 1942, 97-101.) 

However, the "Division of Negro Service," a department created at the BCFA initially to 

oversee the Negro Project, did implement some of the educational goals Sanger 

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