Although she died 30 years ago, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger can still stir up passions - this time on the University of Minnesota campus.
On Monday, a student committee voted unanimously to condemn the birth-control crusader as a racist and white supremacist and to call on officials to remove her poster from a display on "great minds" hanging at the Wilson Library since 1988.The resolution against Sanger was sponsored by a group of conservative students led by Tom Gromacki, 21, a political science major who is running for the state Legislature as a Republican.
Conservatives and liberals alike on the student government's Academic Affairs committee embraced the resolution. They were persuaded by arguments that Sanger - long hailed as a pioneer of women's reproductive freedom - was motivated by eugenics, the idea that some people are more fit to have babies than others.
"The more and more you get involved," said Gromacki, "the more you see that what she was involved with was birth control for the purpose of creating a master race."
Several students argued against removing Sanger's picture, saying it's better to encourage discussion about what she really stood for.
However, no one stepped up to defend Sanger's reputation at a sparsely attended open forum on Monday at the student union.
"The tragedy is that the views have been so completely misrepresented," said Ellen Chesler, who wrote a 1992 biography of Sanger, "Woman of Valor." "She certainly wasn't a racist by the standards of her day. Quite the contrary." And branding her a racist today, she said, is "preposterous meddling with history."
Sanger's grandson, Alexander Sanger, 48, who is now president of Planned Parenthood of New York, agreed. "It's time we put this debate to rest," he said in a telephone interview.
The university's chief librarian, Tom Shaughnessy, rejected the idea of removing Sanger's portrait, regardless of her views:
"I think if the students really thought about what libraries are all about, I think they might have second thoughts about asking us to take it down. It would be a very dangerous step for us to take."
This isn't the first time a picture of Sanger has prompted a furor on a Twin Cities campus. Three years ago, officials at the University of St. Thomas refused a similar call to remove her portrait from a display after critics said her philosophy clashed with the university's Catholic teachings.
Monday's 12-0 vote in favor of the resolution is merely advisory and must go to the full student government for a vote next week.
The resolution also calls on the university's health service to stop using a picture of Sanger in an advertising campaign promoting use of contraceptives.
Gromacki described Sanger as a Nazi sympathizer who once spoke at a rally of the Ku Klux Klan, published an essay on "racial hygiene" by Hitler aide Ernst Rudin and called for establishment of "a race of thoroughbreds" with "more children from the fit, less from the unfit."
But Sanger defenders say most of the inflammatory comments attributed to her are inaccurate or distorted.
Chesler and Alexander Sanger said Margaret Sanger, a public health nurse and a Socialist, believed in a form of eugenics that was popular in the 1920s and '30s and was shared by such people as Eleanor Roosevelt and Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.
"Like many progressives of her day, she at one time favored incentives for sterilization of people with various hereditary conditions," he said. "No one, including my grandmother, today would stand up and agree with those, but it was part of a progressive tradition back in the '20s."
Yet, at the same time, he said, she rejected the idea that eugenics should be based on race or income.
"Martin Luther King Jr. understood all this when he accepted the Margaret Sanger Award in the 1960s," he said. "He understood that Margaret Sanger stood for black women having the same rights as white women to have the number of children they wanted."
In fact, he said, "one of the things that I am proudest of is that when the Nazis started burning books, one of the first books they threw on the fire was my grandmother's. She stood for everything that they opposed."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)