MSNBC contributor Melissa Harris-Perry’s utterance on television last fall equating the injustices of the Jim Crow era to the 2011 Mississippi ballot measure that would recognize all human beings as persons certainly garnered less attention than it deserved. In attempting to make her case, the Tulane Political Science professor invoked the story of a horrific crime perpetrated against Mississippi Civil Rights hero Fannie Lou Hamer in 1961.
“She and many, many other poor African-American women, during the era of Jim Crow, were given what came to be called “Mississippi Appendectomies”—literally going in either for a childbirth or for other minor procedures and having their uteruses removed through hysterectomies that they had not consented to,“ said Harris-Perry. “Now this is on the other side of that. What’s happening now is Mississippi, once again, making a choice, as a state, as a government, to intervene in the reproductive life choices of women and of families in ways that will undoubtedly have dramatic and negative impact on women’s health.”[1]
What Harris-Perry failed to include in her remarks was that the compulsory sterilization policies were championed by the early eugenicists, and the eugenics movement has had no greater ally than it did in Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger.
In her “Plan for Peace,” promoted in speeches and published in the April 1932 issue of Birth Control Review, Sanger specified that her objective was “to apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted” and “to give certain dysgenic [genetically inferior] groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization.” She concluded, “[M]illions of our population would then be organized into soldiers of defense--defending the unborn against their own disabilities.”[2]
In the October 1921 issue of Birth Control Review, Sanger agreed that eugenics was “the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems.”[3]
History revisionists have a difficult time explaining away the “Negro Project.” Sanger launched this undertaking in 1939 to foist the eugenics-based policies on the nation’s poor black communities.
Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer recognized the tactics of the population control movement, and did not hesitate to appropriately identify them.
In This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer, author Kay Mills writes that Hamer’s position on abortion was “unequivocal.” Hamer called the population controller’s methods “genocide.” She is quoted saying, “I believe that legal abortion is legal murder.”
Hamer testified in 1973 that “God breathed life into [the unborn] just like he did into us. And I think these children have a right to live.”[4]
As the youngest of 20 children, Hamer referred to her origins as a “narrow escape to be here.” She said, “[I]f you give them a chance, they might grow up to be Fannie Lou Hamer or something else.”[5]
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| Annie Devine, Fannie Lou Hamer and Rev. Ed King |
Mississippi Civil Rights activist, retired United Methodist clergy, and personal friend of Fannie Lou Hamer, Rev. Edwin King, told an audience on the 38th anniversary of Roe v. Wade that Hamer was responsible for shaping his strong pro-life convictions. “Mrs. Hamer was the first person to make me start thinking,” he said. “She quickly realized that…this new so-called ‘right to abortion’ was wrong for everybody, black and white. She was a new prophetic voice telling me and others that abortion is murder.”[6]
"Mrs. Hamer said to me that we should see the white racism in the legalization of abortion," recalls King. "She said that whites had always tried to control blacks…now there were too many blacks in America, so this new genocide was the answer to the victories of the Civil Rights Movement."[7]
In 1962, just a year after the violation against Hamer, a bill in the Mississippi legislature would propose to open new Planned Parenthood facilities throughout the state and impose criminal penalties on parents of illegitimate children for failing to attend a mandatory family planning session. A Civil Rights group deemed it the “planned parenthood bill” and noted that sterilization would have been “strongly advocated.” Two years later, another bill proposed compulsory sterilization or a 3-5 year prison sentence for mothers of two or more illegitimate children.[8]
"Mrs. Hamer said to me that we should see the white racism in the legalization of abortion," recalls King. "She said that whites had always tried to control blacks…now there were too many blacks in America, so this new genocide was the answer to the victories of the Civil Rights Movement."[7]
In 1962, just a year after the violation against Hamer, a bill in the Mississippi legislature would propose to open new Planned Parenthood facilities throughout the state and impose criminal penalties on parents of illegitimate children for failing to attend a mandatory family planning session. A Civil Rights group deemed it the “planned parenthood bill” and noted that sterilization would have been “strongly advocated.” Two years later, another bill proposed compulsory sterilization or a 3-5 year prison sentence for mothers of two or more illegitimate children.[8]
Careful to disassociate themselves from the legislation, former Vice President of the American Eugenics Society and Planned Parenthood President Alan Guttmacher would tell Medical World News just a few years later in 1969: “Each country will have to decide its own form of coercion, and determine how it is to be employed. At present, the means available are compulsory sterilization and compulsory abortion. Perhaps someday a way of enforcing compulsory birth control will be feasible.”[9]
Rev. King relates how Hamer predicted the dramatic and negative effects of Sanger’s vision. “You know, or can easily find, some of the dreadful statistics,” he continued. “American abortion rates have been dropping, but still the slaughter of the innocents continues, and there is a racial component. In the nation, a black child in the womb is twice as likely to be killed as a white child.”[10]
In fact, today, abortion is the leading cause of death in the black community—higher than the next seven leading causes combined.[11] Nearly 40% of black preborn babies’ lives are ended by surgical abortion.[12]
In fact, today, abortion is the leading cause of death in the black community—higher than the next seven leading causes combined.[11] Nearly 40% of black preborn babies’ lives are ended by surgical abortion.[12]
Clouded by the mantra of “choice,” many prefer to conclude that the abortion industry has severed ties with the eugenic schemes of Sanger, but consider the evidence. A 2009 New York Times interview with sitting Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg revealed that she “thought that at that time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth, and particularly, growth in populations that we don't want to have too many of.”[13]
It follows then that if Melissa Harris-Perry is earnestly seeking to draw an accurate correlation, she need not invent a link, and she need not look beyond Margaret Sanger’s discriminatory and racist promotion of compulsory sterilization and her lasting legacy of the modern-day abortion industry.
California Civil Rights Foundation President Walter Hoye describes the Jim Crow era as “more than a series of rigid anti-Black laws.”
“It was a way of life. Under Jim Crow, Black Americans were non-persons. We were not entitled the rights and privileges of a Constitution,” he explains. “Jim Crow was imposed, top-down, by corrupt public officials. It represented both the legalization and legitimization of anti-Black racism in its ugliest form.”
Personhood, on the other hand, aims to correct today’s imbalance. It is a movement of the people to recognize the inherent rights of all people of every race, gender, and age. If Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer were here today, you can be sure she would be leading the charge.
“This is more than a Civil Rights Act, this is a human rights act. This ought to be the act that brings white folks and black folks together and cut out this racism and bigotry—because it’s bigger than that!” - Mississippi Civil Rights Activist and Personhood Amendment Supporter Dr. John Perkins
[2] Sanger, Margaret. "My Way to Peace," 17 Jan. 1931. http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/webedition/app/documents/show.php?sangerDoc=129036.xml
[3] Sanger, Margaret. "The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda." Birth Control Review Oct 1921. http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/webedition/app/documents/show.php?sangerDoc=238946.xml
[4] Mills, Kay. This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007.
[5] This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer
[6] LeMasters, Eric. "United Methodist Ethicist Denounces Abortion." The Institute on Religion and Democracy 24 January 2011. http://www.theird.org/Page.aspx?pid=1765
[7] Tooley, Mark. "Religiously Demanding Obamacare Abortion Funding." The American Spectator 25 January 2011. http://spectator.org/archives/2011/01/25/religiously-demanding-obamacar
[8] The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Genocide in Mississippi. Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, 1964. http://larson.library.emory.edu/marbl/DigProjects/swh/images/Curry%20818/0818-053.pdf
[9] Chesterton, G.K. and Michael W. Perry. Eugenics and other evils: an argument against the scientifically organized state. Seattle: Inkling Books, 2000.
[10] LeMasters, Eric. "United Methodist Ethicist Denounces Abortion." The Institute on Religion and Democracy 24 January 2011. http://www.theird.org/Page.aspx?pid=1765
[11] National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2008.
[12] Abortion Surveillance Report, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2006. http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5808a1.htm?s_cid=ss5808a1_e
[13] Bazelon, Emily. "The Place of Women on the Court." New York Times Magazine 7 July 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/magazine/12ginsburg-t.html?pagewanted=all
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