To the Editor:
On Tuesday, Nov. 21, a flyer appeared around Hamilton Smith Hall advertising an event sponsored by Students for Choice, the Young America's Foundation and the Student Activity fee. The advertisement featured a picture of Margaret Sanger, the public health worker and Planned Parenthood founder, with a speech bubble proclaiming, "We do not want 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."
The headline of the flyer is entirely in keeping with an academic environment, inviting all to "Question what you have been told..." Education is certainly about looking beneath the surface of the stories we have been given, and in this case, I hope it's also about looking beyond quotations taken out of context.
Margaret Sanger was motivated to help end poverty, first and foremost. ANY look at her writing reveals how desperately she felt and how fiercely she advocated for people caught in the cycle of low wages and crowded, unsanitary living conditions with little hope of exodus. A group she felt particular concern for was the impoverished black population in the South since they struggled against not just poverty, but racism and discrimination. Sanger notes, "What hangs over the South is that the Negro has been in servitude. The white southerner is slow to forget this. His attitude is the archaic in this age. Supremacist thinking belongs in the museum."
The quote these groups have calculatingly taken out of context is meant to smear the reputation of a woman who did found Planned Parenthood, but who also worked tirelessly to better the living conditions of women and children regardless of race in a time of desperate need and very little education. She actually made the statement in response to the negative publicity many organizations were generating against her to try and stop her work during her lifetime. It was this faulty impression she didn't want 'out.' Sanger actually believed that there was one race, a human race, and that racial betterment involved all of us.
We, the undersigned, are English 401 and 501 teachers, many of whom happen to be teaching the researched essay to students right now. We want our students to be able to wrestle with complex and essential moral and ethical issues. We hope to provide them many forums where they can think out loud on the page and come up with documents that are soundly argued, regardless of the viewpoint. We aim to arm them to defend themselves and their beliefs, and we want them to write about those beliefs most important to them, including abortion, because we also want them to learn that writing with passion and investment in their topics is what will lead to their best thinking, their best essays.
It's also, however, our job to teach them to be responsible, to acknowledge dissonance in their own thinking, to anticipate the counterargument and to not shy away from or distort valid points from the other side. This flyer is an example of none of these practices.
We can only hope that this incredibly irresponsible quotation is meant to gather more of a crowd to the event so that the organizations involved can then more fully explain its context. We wonder if they will also apologize at that time to members of the community whose discomfort at having flyers proclaiming a desire for the extermination of a people papered all over campus is simply a casualty of the "buzz" they want to generate for their meeting.
Sincerely,
Shelley Girdner Meredith Hall Leah Williams Molly Doyle Robin Lent Janet Schofield Clark Knowles
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