Six Quotes Hint Why Margaret Sanger Received “a dozen invitations” to speak at Ku Klux Klan Rallies

Most of us, myself included, will live our entire lives and never be invited to speak at a single Ku Klux Klan Rally.  And yet, Margaret Sanger, the foundress of Planned Parenthood, received at least 13 such invitations.  Would someone from Planned Parenthood please tell us why Margaret Sanger was so in demand on the KKK speaking circuit?

Six Quotes Hint Why Marget Sanger Received “a dozen invitations” to speak at Ku Klux Klan Rallies

Margaret Sanger wrote about her Ku Klux Klan speech in her autobiography, “I accepted an invitation to talk to the women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan…I saw through the door dim figures parading with banners and illuminated crosses…I was escorted to the platform, was introduced, and began to speak…In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered.” (Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography, P.366)

Most of us, myself included, will live our entire lives and never be invited to speak at a single Ku Klux Klan Rally.  And yet, Margaret Sanger, the foundress of Planned Parenthood, received at least 13 such invitations.  Would someone from Planned Parenthood please tell us why Margaret Sanger was so in demand on the KKK speaking circuit?

What did Margaret Sanger say in her talk at the KKK Rally in Silver Lake New Jersey that led to twelve more invitations? Well, take a look at some of her past quotes:


1) “We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the 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.”

Margaret Sanger’s December 19, 1939 letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble, 255 Adams Street, Milton, Massachusetts. Original source: Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, North Hampton, Massachusetts. Also described in Linda Gordon’s Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976.

2) “Eugenic sterilization is an urgent need … We must prevent multiplication of this bad stock.”

Margaret Sanger, April 1933 Birth Control Review.

3) “Our failure to segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying … demonstrates our foolhardy and extravagant sentimentalism … [Philanthropists] encourage the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant … We are paying for, and even submitting to, the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.”

 Margaret Sanger. The Pivot of Civilization, 1922. Chapter on “The Cruelty of Charity,” pages 116, 122, and 189. Swarthmore College Library edition.

4) “The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”

 Margaret Sanger (editor). The Woman Rebel, Volume I, Number 1. Reprinted in Woman and the New Race. New York: Brentanos Publishers, 1922.

5) “Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race.”

 Margaret Sanger. Woman, Morality, and Birth Control. New York: New York Publishing Company, 1922. Page 12.

6) “Eugenics is … the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems.Margaret Sanger. “
The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda.” Birth Control Review, October 1921, page 5.