During a recent interview on Fox News about Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson resurrected old claims that the group wants to extinguish Blacks through abortion, according to The Washington Post:
“Well, maybe I’m not objective when it comes to Planned Parenthood,” Carson told Fox on Aug. 12. “But you know, I know who Margaret Sanger is, and I know that she believed in eugenics, and that she was not particularly enamored with black people. And one of the reasons that you find most of their clinics in black neighborhoods is so that you can find way to control that population. And I think people should go back and read about Margaret Sanger, who founded this place — a woman who Hillary Clinton by the way says she admires. Look and see what many people in Nazi Germany thought about her.”
The Post went on to evaluate Carson’s claims, a resurrection of those made during the 2012 presidential race by then-Republican candidate Herman Cain, who accused the group of targeting African-Americans by locating abortion clinics in largely Black communities.
Via The Washington Post:
Sanger recruited black leaders to support the effort and, in letters to the project’s director, urged that white men who were outsiders should not run the clinics. She said the effort would gain more credibility with greater community involvement, given natural suspicions.
“The minister’s work is also important and he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach,” Sanger wrote in a 1939 letter. “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 inartfully written passage is frequently taken out of context to suggest Sanger was seeking to exterminate blacks.)
The Post notes that it was accused in 2012 of “sugarcoating Sanger’s record, in particular for some language on her paternalistic view of Blacks.” What do you think?