The Negro Project, instigated in 1939 by Margaret Sanger, was one of the first major undertakings of the new Birth Control Federation of America (BCFA), the product of a merger between the American Birth Control League and Sanger's Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau, and one of the more controversial campaigns of the birth control movement. Developed by white birth control reformers, who consulted with AfricanAmericans for help in promoting the project only well after its inception, the NegroProject and associated campaigns were, nevertheless, widely supported by such blackleaders as Mary McLeod Bethune, W. E. B. DuBois, and Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.Influenced strongly by both the eugenics movement and the progressive welfareprograms of the New Deal era, the Negro Project was, from the start, largely indifferentto the needs of the black community and constructed in terms and with perceptions thattoday smack of racism.
What it became was not the project Sanger had first envisioned.
In 1939, Sanger teamed with Mary Woodward Reinhardt, secretary of the newly formed BCFA, to secure a large donor to fund an educational campaign to teach African-American women in the South about contraception. Sanger, Reinhardt, and Sanger's secretary, Florence Rose, drafted a report on "Birth Control and the Negro," skillfully using language that appealed both to eugenicists fearful of unchecked black fertility and progressives committed to shepherding African-Americans into middle-class culture. Thereport stated that "[N]egroes present the great problem of the South," as they are the group with "the greatest economic, health and social problems," and outlined a practicalbirth control program geared toward a population characterized as largely illiterate and that "still breed carelessly and disastrously," a line borrowed from a June 1932 BirthControl Review article by W.E.B. DuBois. Armed with this paper, Reinhardt initiated contact between Sanger and Albert Lasker (soon to be Reinhardt's husband), who pledged $20,000 starting in November 1939. ("Birth Control and the Negro," July 1939, Lasker Papers)
However, once funding was secured, the project slipped from Sanger's hands. She had proposed that the money go to train "an up and doing modern minister, colored, and an up and doing modern colored medical man" at her New York clinic who would then tour"as many Southern cities and organizations and churches and medical societies as they can get before" and "preach and preach and preach!" She believed that after a year of such "educational agitation," the Federation could support a "practical campaign for supplying mothers with contraceptives." Before going in and establishing clinics, Sanger thought it critical to gain the support and involvement of the African-American community(not just its leaders) and establish a foundation of trust. Her proposal derived from the work of activists in the field, discussions with black leaders, and her experience with the New York clinics. Sanger understood the concerns of some within the black community about having Northern whites intervene in the most intimate aspect of their lives. "I do not believe," she warned, "that this project should be directed or run by white medical men.
In the end, Sanger's plan for an educational campaign to precede the demonstration project lost out to the white medical and public relations men running the new Federation.
But the BCFA (which changed its name to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942) forced Florence Rose to leave in 1943 – 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 NegroService floundered and soon shut down. The Federation delegated "Negro" work to other departments and eventually passed off remnants of the program to state affiliates
"The public rationale for the Project was rooted ineconomics, tax-payer burden, and the social threats posed by what was perceived to bean exploding black underclass, rather than the health and sexual liberation of blackwomen (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).
