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MSPP / Newsletter / Newsletter #28 (Fall 2001) 

outlined. Under the direction of Florence Rose, with money raised by Sanger, and 
inspired by an advisory council of eminent black leaders, educators and health 

professionals, the Division undertook significant education projects from 1940-1943. 

Rose flooded every black organization in the country with planned parenthood literature, 

set up exhibits, instigated local and national press coverage and hired a black woman 

doctor, Mae McCarroll, to teach birth control techniques to black doctors and lobby 

medical groups. Though still stinging from the rejection of her earlier proposal for the 

Negro Project, Sanger wrote enthusiastically to Albert Lasker in July of 1942 about what 

she now framed as a pioneering effort: "I believe that the Negro question is coming 

definitely to the fore in America, not only because of the war, but in anticipation of the 

place the Negro will occupy after the peace. I think it is magnificent that we are in on the 

ground floor, helping Negroes to control their birth rate, to reduce their high infant and 

maternal death rate, to maintain better standards of health and living for those already 

born, and to create better opportunities for those who will be born. In other words, we're 

giving Negroes an opportunity to help themselves, and to rise to their own heights 

through education and the principles of a democracy." (MS to Lasker, July 9, 1942, MSM 

S21:404) 

But the BCFA (which changed its name to the Planned Parenthood Federation of 

America in 1942) forced Florence Rose to leave in 1943 &ndash; a result of her inability 

to follow new bureaucratic procedures and her allegiance to Sanger, who was immersed 

in her own clashes with Federation staff. With Rose's departure, the Division of Negro 

Service floundered and soon shut down. The Federation delegated "Negro" work to 

other departments and eventually passed off remnants of the program to state affiliates. 

Arguments persist about whether or not the Negro Project was purely a racist endeavor 

(search for "Sanger" "Negro Project" and "racism" on the Internet and be prepared for 

the onslaught). Certainly the patriarchal racism of the time that guided many of the social 

policies in Washington and the practices of philanthropic and charitable organizations 

working to "lift up" African-Americans, dictated both the Federation's and Sanger's 

approach to blacks and birth control. The public rationale for the Project was rooted in 

economics, tax-payer burden, and the social threats posed by what was perceived to be 

an exploding black underclass, rather than the health and sexual liberation of black 

women (though it should be notes that the birth control movement largely ignored the 

issue of women's —black or white— sexual autonomy in the interwar years). And there 

is no doubt that a good number of medical professionals involved in the birth control 

movement exhibited strong racist sentiments, some of them arguing for and even 

carrying out compulsory sterilization on black women considered to be of low intelligence 

and therefore not capable of choosing not to control their fertility, as well as on those 

deemed morally or behaviorally deviant. But there is no evidence that Sanger or even 

the Federation coerced or intended to coerce black women into using birth control. The 

fundamental belief, underscored at every meeting, mentioned in much of the behind-the-
scenes correspondence, and evident in all the printed material put out by the Division of 

Negro Service, was that uncontrolled fertility presented the greatest burden to the poor, 
and Southern blacks were among the poorest Americans. In fact, the Negro Project did 

not differ very much from the earlier birth control campaigns in the rural South designed 
to test simpler methods on poor, uneducated and mostly white agricultural communities. 

Following these other efforts in the South, it would have been more racist, in Sanger's 
mind, to ignore African-Americans in the South than to fail at trying to raise the health 

and economic standards of their communities. 

All contents copyright © The Margaret Sanger Papers. All rights reserved. 

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