Blacks sterilized by eugenics program funded by Margaret

Sanger supporter

Posted by Life Dynamics

Apr 11, 2014 10:57:00 AM

Eugenic sterilization programs existed in America in at least 31 states. Many of the women

forced or coerced into sterilization were black.

From 1929 to 1974, the state of North Carolina forcibly sterilized thousands of people who were

deemed to be mentally handicapped, promiscuous or unfit to have children.

Life Dynamics has documented the history of the American Eugenics Society including North

Carolina’s forced sterilization program in our film, Maafa21: Black Genocide in 21st Century

America.

Eugenics Society member, Margaret Sanger, who later founded Planned Parenthood, also

advocated sterilization of the so-called unfit.

In 1950 Sanger advocated eugenic sterilization in a personal letter she wrote to Katharine Dexter

McCormick, an heir to the International Harvester fortune who used her immense wealth to fund

the development of the birth-control pill.

Sanger wrote, “I consider that the world and almost our civilization for the next

twenty-five years, is going to depend upon a simple, cheap, safe contraceptive to be

used in poverty stricken slums, jungles, and among the most ignorant people. Even

this will not be sufficient, because I believe that now, immediately; there should be

national sterilization for certain dysgenic types of our population who are being

encouraged to breed and would die out were the government not feeding them.”

Sanger’s connections to eugenics was nothing new. She had long praised their ideologies and

published several articles on the topic in her Birth Control Review.

In 1935, Sanger’s American Birth Control League published a resolution to unite with the

American Eugenics Society.

Mark Crutcher, President of Life Dynamics elaborates, “These ties between eugenics and

Planned Parenthood’s founder were so well established that Sanger, who was a long standing

member of the American Eugenics Society, once pursued a plan to merge the American Birth

Control League, or Planned Parenthood as it was later called, with the American Eugenics

Society. However, despite Sanger’s strong support for the merger, it would eventually be

rejected by the leadership of the American Eugenics Society. Sanger then pushed a proposal that

would have combined the publications of the two organizations into one magazine. But again,

that idea was also rejected by the American Eugenics Society.”

In 1939, Sanger described the American Birth Control League's Negro Project in a letter to

fellow eugenicist, Clarence Gamble, "The minister's work is also important and also he should

be trained, perhaps by the Federation as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. We

do not want the 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."

Gamble was a heir to the Proctor and Gamble fortune and a major financial backer of

Sanger's.

Gamble was also a director of Margaret Sanger's American Birth Control League, which later

changed its name to Planned Parenthood.

In 1947, Gamble called for the expansion of North Carolina's State's sterilization program saying

that for every feeble minded person sterilized, 40 more were polluting and degrading the

bloodlines of future generation with their defective genes.

Research from North Carolina's Winston-Salem Journal reveals a long history of abuses in the

N.C. sterilization program -- abuses that Gamble consistently glossed over. According to the

Journal, "Gamble wanted sterilizations to increase rather than decrease, and increase they did."

But merely wanting the sterilizations to happen was not enough for this Margaret Sanger

supporter. Clarence Gamble put his money where his eugenics views were and actually funded

the North Carolina Eugenics Board that sterilized many blacks, including 14 year old Elaine

Riddick.

This is her story excerpted from Life Dynamics' film: Maafa21:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNnjqkV9QIs

Shortly after this interview in Maafa21, Elaine Riddick testified before the North Carolina State

Legislature in a successful effort to receive compensation for the sterilization.

“They cut me open like I was a hog,” Elaine Riddick testified

tearfully, “I didn’t even know nothing about this stuff.”

Riddick told the lawmakers that her only crime was being poor, BLACK, and from a bad

home environment.

North Carolina was not the only state whose eugenics programs were influenced by friends of

Sanger or Planned Parenthood. In some parts of the country, Planned Parenthood was closely

associated with these state eugenics boards and was often a referral agency for them.

In fact, documents from eugenics publications reveal that later, as Sanger's American Birth

Control League morphed into Planned Parenthood they received rent free space from the

Eugenics Society.

A fact which is rarely reported is that, in many places, Planned Parenthood was one and the same

as the Eugenics Society.

For example, when the first birth control clinic was opened in Arkansas, it was operated by the

Arkansas Eugenics Association and overseen by a woman named Hilda Cornish.

Later the Arkansas Eugenics Association would become the Arkansas State Affiliate of Planned

Parenthood and Cornish would be named its executive director.

Supporters and directors of Margaret Sanger were, like her, entrenched in eugenics. Sanger's

backers knew that they were promoting views that would limit the population of a certain group

or race of people, primarily African Americans. Their eugenics agenda reached into the lives of

innocent and unsuspecting victims like Elaine Riddick with programs of coerced sterilization.

But Elaine represents merely a fraction of the black women affected by eugenics.

Over the years the names of these organizations may have changed but their eugenics agenda

remains the same and are targeting more unsuspecting people today.

"Euphemisms and sterilization target code words, for example, “feebleminded”, were used to

describe Black women like me, Elaine Riddick. I was forcibly sterilized at the age of 14 years

under North Carolina’s inhumane forced sterilization policy. A policy that was derived from

Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood population control handbook, which spread across the

United States by her loyal band of eugenicists and lobbying our elected officials," Elaine Riddick

wrote recently.

For more on the forced sterilization of Black women and the eugenics movement, watch

Maafa21.

For more on Life Dynamics go here http://www.lifedynamics.com