REVERSING AN UNHOLY ALLIANCE FROM HISTORY
Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, charmed the African American community’s most distinguished leaders into embracing the concepts of birth control, abortion, and sterilization. She was very clever in how she sought to promote her ideals of eugenics and white supremacy. Sanger’s My Plan for Peace emerged, which encouraged dealing with the “dysgenic population” through forced sterilization and mandatory segregation.
As her organization grew, Sanger targeted minority groups by setting up clinics in their neighborhoods. She aggressively promoted an agenda to reduce the number of undesirable people, whom she considered to be human weeds. Sanger recognized that African Americans were largely religious people, and she believed their ministers could be useful in getting their congregations to accept her ideas. Sanger sought to co-sponsor tent revivals in an attempt to reduce the black population. In some cases, this was done in partnership with white-led churches.
Sanger’s tents were set up with the revival tents, and African Americans were herded in and counseled on the benefits of sterilization and birth limitation. “We weren’t even allowed to go into the revival meeting itself until we’d listened to their whole spiel. Our family never went to church again. Not any church, black or white. Mamma didn’t want to have anything to do with a faith that could sanction things like that,” recalled Lettie Perkins, a black woman who attended.
Margaret Sanger once sought to hijack the tent revival with her racist agenda, but we want to raise up prayer for the ending of abortion in conjunction with Tent America 2019. This national prayer initiative with Tent America is an opportunity to reverse that unholy alliance.