There is no question that America was steeped in racism during Margaret Sanger’s lifetime; 1879-1966. From Jim Crow laws, segregation, lynchings, antisemitism, turning away Jewish refugees during WWII, Japanese internment camps, etc. 

It is no wonder that Margaret Sanger is classed as a racist. After I discovered that Sanger was anti-abortion I truly expected that to be the end of things I’d gotten wrong about her. There was no way that she wasn’t racist. After all, she wrote a book called “Women & The New Race”. But the more I read, the more I was convinced she was very progressive in this regard. 

When she traveled to Hawaii, she wrote about her experiences and pleasure at seeing the lack of racism. “What surprised and pleased me most was the complete absence of race prejudice. I looked out over faces, mostly American but with a liberal sprinkling of Chinese and Japanese in their native costumes and Hawaiians in bright Mother Hubbards. Honolulu was the only place I had found where, class for class, internationalism did exist.” 1

A quick scan of her writings and you will find that she uses the word race a lot. The betterment of the race, the cleansing of the race, etc. But in their context, and knowing her views on racism it is clear that she is talking about the human race. She said, “if 'unfit' refers to races or religions, then that is another matter which I frankly deplore."2 She didn’t regard the white race as superior or speak about people of colour as lesser. She had plenty to say about the conditions of poor classes of whites and did not discriminate between races. 

Sanger worked on the Negro Project, which is pointed at as an attempt to eliminate the African-American population. There were certainly people who wanted that, as Sanger later relates in an interview. “When we first started out an anti-Negro white man offered me $10,000 if I started in Harlem first. His idea was simply to cut down the number of Negroes... That is, of course, not our idea. I turned him down. But that is an example of how vicious some people can be about this thing.” 3

Sanger wrote about the problems among the African-American community, “Last year 40,000 Negro mothers and babies died in childbirth in this country. They died, for the most part, as a result of inadequate medical attention, poor living conditions, improper diet and many other ills, which taken together made for mothers who were poor maternity risks from the start... 45 per cent of the Negro population lives in sub-standard housing, together with the fact that four-fifths of all Negro babies are born in states that have less than the national average income, helped to swell the total of 12,000 babies who died in 1945... The real answer, of course, is better housing. All America is now aware of this gnawing need. But until this housing takes shape in wood and stone and indoor plumbing, lets not make physical and emotional casualties of too many innocent children.” 4

She admitted that birth control is not an end-all-be-all solution, but promotes it as an immediate solution while other problems are worked on. She believed that if women were free to decide when or when not to have children, it would improve their station and situation.

She also wrote about the lack of and inadequacy of medical care in the South. “The death rate of Negro mothers is three times as high as that of whites. The stillbirth ratio is twice as high among Negroes. Nor are Negroes the only underprivileged people in our society. In Puerto Rico, the maternal death rate is nearly twice that of the continental United States, the infant death rate more than double. Birth control, of course, is not the sole reason. The fact that on the average Negroes have less access to hospitalization and medical care in childbirth plays its part.” 4

The Negro Project was endorsed by The Amsterdam News - a black newspaper. It was supported by many African-American leaders, including civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune, NAACP founder W. E. B. DuBois, Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., politician and pastor, and Charles S. Johnson – Fisk University’s first black president and a member of the Birth Control Foundation of America. The Afro-American and The Chicago Defender featured Sanger’s writing, the list goes on and on. Some people claim that all these supporters were merely duped. They seem like intelligent people to me who truly supported Sanger’s ideas. There were black members of the eugenics movement, DuBois even wrote an article for the June 1932 issue of the Birth Control Review. 

Though the BCFA initially supported Sanger’s project, they later changed their mind. Instead of funding her project, they funded clinics run by whites and dropped the educational campaign. She had wanted birth control education and resources, but once out of her hands it changed to promoting sterilization and the information on contraceptives was scarce.

In her famous letter to C.J. Gamble, she says that the clinics should be run by black doctors, and not white people, as they would not trust them. “The minister’s work is also important and also he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation. 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.” It was a terribly worded way to express her views.

In searching her writings, and reading what contemporary supporters said, I can find no evidence that she wanted to exterminate the African-American community. In context, it seems clear to me that she wasn’t trying to hide a nefarious intent, but rather prevent misconceptions. Her project was taken out of her hands and quickly fizzled out.

Later on, when Martin Luther King Jr. accepted the Margaret Sanger award, in the speech his wife delivered on his behalf, he praised the work Sanger had done. “There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger’s early efforts. She, like we, saw the horrifying conditions of ghetto life. Like we, she knew that all of society is poisoned by cancerous slums. Like we, she was a direct actionist — a nonviolent resister... Margaret Sanger had to commit what was then called a crime in order to enrich humanity, and today we honor her courage and vision; for without them there would have been no beginning. Our sure beginning in the struggle for equality by nonviolent direct action may not have been so resolute without the tradition established by Margaret Sanger and people like her.” 5

Margaret Sanger did speak out about racism. She had travelled extensively throughout her lifetime, and compared some of the atrocities she had witnessed to the racism in the United States. 

“I can recall many horrible things I saw in India. I once saw a white man come out of a train; there were five or six Indians in his way; he just kicked them away – literally with his foot. There were a hundred people around, who were powerless to strike him. The white man’s power and the Indian’s defencelessness were so unjust.

In China, the Chinese could not go on ‘our’ property. A Chinese doctor was not allowed to see me, couldn’t come into the American area. Discrimination is a world-wide thing. It has to be oppressed everywhere. That is why I feel the Negro’s plight here is linked with that of the oppressed around the globe.” 3

She spoke against supremacist thinking, in a way that was uncommon in her days. “What hangs over the South is that the Negro has been in servitude. The white southerner is slow to forget this. His attitude is the archaic of this age. Supremacist thinking belongs in the museum.” 3

However, Sanger did speak to the women of the Klu Klux Klan. Many photos are circulating of her speaking before hooded men, rousing them to racist action. These images are photoshopped, and the truth is far different. 

“Always to me any aroused group was a good group, and therefore I accepted an invitation to talk to the women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan at Silver Lake, New Jersey, one of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing.” She spoke to them about the use of birth control, encouraging them to use it themselves. “Never before had I looked into a sea of faces like these... My address that night had to be in the most elementary terms, as though I were trying to make children understand.”6

Once she finished her speech, she was given more invitations to speak to these groups. It was late at night, and as she relates, “I could not even send a telegram to let my family know whether I had been thrown in the river or was being held incommunicado.”6 She clearly did not hold the KKK in high regard.

Her quotes on racism peg the problem on whites, and this leads to the next subject: Nazism. “The big answer, as I see it, is the education of the white man. The white man is the problem. It is the same as with the Nazis. We must change the white attitudes. That is where it lies.”3 

The biggest connection between the Nazi party and Sanger was a man by the name of Ernst Rudin, who was the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry in Munich. He was very much involved in the Nazi race policy. 

In April 1933, he wrote an article on sterilization for the Birth Control Review – the year that the Nazi Party seized power, and eight years before the US entered WWII. The Birth Control Review was founded by Margaret Sanger, however, she had resigned from it in 1929 and was no longer involved. There was no connection between these two figures.

In 1939, Sanger wrote a draft statement called “Hitler & the War”. “Before Hitler came into power in Germany, I was one of the few Americans who joined the Anti-Nazi Committe and gave money, my name and any influence I had with writers and others, to combat Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. When Hitler got into the saddle and burned all books he considered (not immoral) but dangerous to the State, my three books were destroyed and have not been allowed to circulate in Germany. The publisher and translator were put into concentration camps and I have never heard of them since.” 7

She criticized the Nazis not only for their concentration camps, forced labour and slaughter, but also for their breeding programs. “The Nazis have encouraged illegitimacy in their mad desire to create more little Nazis, given these children the dubious honor of having Nazi dignitaries for godparents.” 8

The eugenics movement had many racists ideas and members. Sanger should have done more to speak out against this. Although she didn’t always, she certainly was far from being racist. 

  I will conclude this article with a few more quotes which speak for themselves.

“We must protect tomorrow’s Chinese baby and Hindu baby, English and Russian baby, Puerto Rican, Negro and white American babies who will stand side by side to heal the scars of this conflict and to bring promise of a better future.” 8

“Finally, all we had considered constant in rational thought, morals, ethics, started to go with equal violence in the other direction towards dictatorship and nationalism and race prejudice—a giving over of individual freedom. The immediacy of the deaths of women in childbirth seemed so small in comparison, of so little consequence; no longer were felt the pains of problems which used to be of such deep concern.” 9

   NOTE: Part 3 of this series is on sterilization and eugenics, where we delve into the darker views of Sanger. You can read it here . This is not meant to be a defense of Sanger, I do not consider her a hero or role model. I simply believe that it is important to be accurate, and want to correct myths that have been circulating about her and establish the facts about her. Like most historical figures, she is more complex than we might think.

1 – Margaret Sanger: an autobiography, Chapter 25

2 – Margaret Sanger, 1934 letter to Sidney L. Kassel Jr., The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, Volume 2, Ed. Esther Katz (2006), 278.

3 – AMERICAN VIEWPOINT, On U.S. Birth and Bias Control, 22 Sept. 1945. By Earl Conrad

4 – Love or Babies: Must Negro Mothers Choose

By Margaret Sanger from NEGRO DIGEST, August 1946. by Johnson N. Johnson

5 – Martin Luther King Jr., acceptance speech May 10th 1966 for the Margaret Sanger Award, delivered by Coretta Scott King.

6 – Margaret Sanger: an autobiography, Chapter 29

7 – Margaret Sanger, " [Hitler and War] ," [1939]

8 – Population – Everybody’s Business, 1944

9 – Margaret Sanger: an autobiography, Chapter 39