The ongoing political controversy over Planned Parenthood, which has intensified in the wake of several highly edited videos that accuse the group of profiting off the sale of fetal tissue, has made its way from the Capitol to a quite different kind of building in Washington, D.C.
The National Portrait Gallery, a historic art museum in downtown D.C., is being pressured to remove a bust of Planned Parenthood’s founder from an exhibit entitled “Struggle for Justice.”
Conservative critics say that Margaret Sanger — who is largely credited with leading the birth control movement and, in turn, launching a national sexual revolution — shouldn’t be honored by the museum because she held offensive and racist views. A group of black pastors held a rally outside of the Smithsonian museum on Thursday in an attempt to pressure officials to take down the bust, which has been on display there since 2010.
“You must remove the bust!” E.W. Jackson, a far-right pastor who has previously said that Planned Parenthood has been “more lethal” to African Americans than the Ku Klux Klan and that Democrats are “partners” in black genocide, said at Thursday’s rally. “If Margaret Sanger had her way, MLK and Rosa Parks would never have been born.”
At least one Republican presidential candidate, Ted Cruz, has also joined the campaign. This week, Cruz circulated a letter to his fellow lawmakers that calls the bust’s display “an affront both to basic human decency and the very meaning of justice.”
At issue is Sanger’s affiliation with the eugenics movement, the now-discredited theory that the human race would be improved by discouraging the reproduction of certain genetic traits considered to be undesirable. Particularly since Nazi Germany embraced the tenets of eugenics, Planned Parenthood opponents often draw comparisons between Sanger and Adolf Hitler. Many anti-abortion groups claim that Sanger wanted to eliminate the black race altogether, and argue that Planned Parenthood continues to work toward this goal by opening abortion clinics in primarily black neighborhoods.
It’s certainly true that Sanger had ties to eugenicists — as well as some strong beliefs about the nature of reproduction that are disturbing in today’s context. Like many scientists and progressives in the early 20th century, Sanger was bought into the theory that family planning was an important method of “preventing the birth of defectives.” She frequently spoke about the need to distribute birth control among the “feebleminded.”
But historians disagree that Sanger’s connection to eugenics proves she wanted to eliminate African Americans. Some scholars even suggest that Sanger — who worked closely with W.E.B. DuBois — “would likely be considered to have advanced views on race relations” for her time.
“I think she worked with the eugenicists because they had some overlapping goals,” Jonathan Eig, the author of a book about the invention of the birth control pill, told the Washington Post earlier this month. “I think it’s easy from today’s standards to say that she was a racist but by the standards of her day, I don’t think you’d say that. So I think it’s a cheap shot.”
Margaret Sanger was born in 1879, when plenty of Americans held mainstream views on race, class, and mental ability that would be considered horribly offensive today.
Indeed, many of the Founding Fathers and U.S. presidents whose images hang in the National Portrait Gallery owned slaves. Some of them were active members of the Ku Klux Klan. Most of the members of the U.S. women’s suffrage movement credited for the 19th Amendment paired their feminist ideals with some racist sentiments — including Susan B. Anthony, whose name is now used by a major anti-abortion group that’s among the critics calling for the removal of Sanger’s bust.
It’s impossible to separate racism from United States history, and it’s unclear why Planned Parenthood is held to a higher standard here than other groups. As Imani Gandy points out in a recent piece on RH Reality Check that exhaustively details the right-wing campaign against Sanger, “Nearly every major corporation that exists today was either founded by racists, employed racists, built their business on anti-Blackness and slavery, or all of the above. Any argument that Black women in America should disavow Planned Parenthood because of some history of anti-Blackness would necessarily require that Black women disavow the very country in which we live.”
Art galleries and history museums aren’t in the business of distancing themselves from the problematic aspects of this country’s legacy, either. The National Portrait Gallery says it has no plans to remove the bust of Margaret Sanger, and maintains that the exhibit doesn’t leave out “the less-than-admirable aspects of her career.”
“No one has to pass a moral test to be included in a museum,” Bethany Bentley, the Portrait Gallery’s head of communications and public affairs, told NPR.