Oakland, CA— “We need talk to about Margaret Sanger,” wrote Planned Parenthood President Alexis McGill Johnson in a recent New York Times op-ed. “We must fully take responsibility for the harm that Sanger caused to generations of people with disabilities and Black, Latino, Asian-American, and Indigenous people.”
“Yes, you must,” says Thomas Cargill, Research Fellow at the Independent Institute and author of the exposé cover article from Independent Institute, “Eugenics in High School History: Failure to Confront the Past” (The Independent Review, Summer 2020), in which Cargill details the failure in America’s high school texts regarding Sanger’s shocking racist beliefs and those of her fellow “progressive” eugenicists.
Those beliefs include Sanger’s endorsement of a 1927 Supreme Court ruling that led to the involuntary sterilization of tens of thousands of black U.S. citizens. Sanger’s eugenics policies were admired by Adolf Hitler and became a model for the Nuremburg Laws of 1935, which denied rights to the “unfit.”
“Johnson’s op-ed,” says Cargill, “is designed, in the end, to put the best possible spin on Planned Parenthood’s outright dishonesty about Sanger—falsehoods that have been known for decades by informed observers of U.S. history. Johnson’s claim that Sanger’s ‘legacy on race’ has been the subject of any serious debate is, by any academic standard, totally misleading.”
Cargill’s illuminating article and subsequent op-ed, “Even as They Cancel Each Other, Progressives Continue to Downplay Their Movement’s Racist Past” (Washington Examiner, September 14, 2020) triggered a media reach of over 10.8 million views (across broadcast, print and web). While welcoming Johnson’s coming clean, finally, about the founder of Planned Parenthood, Cargill notes with breathtaking consistency, “progressives continue to conceal their movement’s dark history of racism, which went far beyond words to include eugenics research that characterized blacks as ‘unfit’ and proposed, through forced sterilization and other means, to produce a nation of ‘thoroughbreds’ through the ‘breeding out’ the unfit.”
Within weeks of Cargills’s original exposé, Planned Parenthood renamed its Margaret Sanger Health Center in New York City in August 2020 and quietly stopped distributing its “highest honor,” the Margaret Sanger Award. Past recipients include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (2014) and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (2009). Upon receiving the Sanger Award, Clinton stated, “I admire Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision. . . I am really in awe of her.”
Credentials: Thomas F. Cargill is a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute and Professor Emeritus of Economics in the College of Business at the University of Nevada, Reno. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University California, Davis, and he has been Visiting Lecturer at Cal State University, Sacramento; Assistant Professor at Purdue University; Visiting Scholar, Comptroller Currency, Washington, D.C,: Visiting Scholar at the Hoover Institution; and Visiting Economist at the Bank of Japan, Tokyo.
To interview Thomas Cargill, contact Robert Ade, [email protected] or (510) 635-3690.
***
INDEPENDENT INSTITUTE
100 Swan Way, Oakland, CA 94621-1428
The Independent Institute is a non-profit research and educational organization that promotes the power of independent thinking to boldly advance peaceful, prosperous, and free societies grounded in a commitment to human worth and dignity. For more information, visit Independent.org.
