On Martin Luther King’s birthday, it’s worth remembering that among many other things, the late civil rights icon was a champion of reproductive justice. King received the inaugural Margaret Sanger Award from Planned Parenthood in 1966. Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, died four months after King’s acceptance of the award that bore her name.
Coretta Scott King accepted the prize on her husband’s behalf, and read a speech of his. It concluded:
…we are natural allies of those who seek to inject any form of planning in our society that enriches life and guarantees the right to exist in freedom and dignity.
For these constructive movements we are prepared to give our energies and consistent support; because in the need for family planning, Negro and white have a common bond; and together we can and should unite our strength for the wise preservation, not of races in general, but of the one race we all constitute — the human race.
Coretta added her own words about Sanger:
‘I am proud tonight to say a word in behalf of your mentor, and the person who symbolizes the ideas of this organization, Margaret Sanger. Because of her dedication, her deep convictions, and for her suffering for what she believed in, I would like to say that I am proud to be a woman tonight.”
And let’s be clear on our history: Planned Parenthood was passionately committed to abortion access long before Dr. King was honored. King would have known that by 1966, Planned Parenthood was headed by Alan Guttmacher, president of the organization from 1962-74 and a tireless and very public advocate for the right of women to terminate unwanted pregnancies.
Dr. King was not silent on the issue of abortion and birth control. His enthusiastic endorsement of Planned Parenthood and his praise for Margaret Sanger made clear his deep and passionate commitment to a full-range of reproductive services for everyone.
Remember that next time someone tries to remake Dr. King into a conservative.
It suprises me how some events in history are just left out. I have learned about MLK since I was so young and now at 25 years of age I am just learning this!
Thanks for this. In honoring MLK’s incredible legacy of racial justice work, the mainstream media tends to ignore his work for women’s rights, poor people, and anti-war efforts. I didn’t know this — good to learn!
Oh, how I wish I could be a fly on the wall in MLK’s brain. He was ahead of his time, to be sure, and I wish I could know what he would say about the world today. To be sure, we’ve made a lot of progress in many areas, but what would he say about the problems we still face?
Wasn’t it just a few weeks ago that there was a topic here about how we suppress our knowledge of the flaws that affect our heroes? It’s interesting to learn that two of the most notably imperfect heroes of recent history actually managed to get together.
Its a valid question to ask, if someone is being celebrated, how rude it is to point out that they weren’t perfect after all. But maybe it adds something to their legacy if we understand that this person didn’t entirely live up to his/her ideals–or are we projecting our own ideals onto them in the first place?
Well, however MLK and Sanger failed along the way — as every one of us fails — their mutual commitment to birth control and reproductive justice was not such a failure!
“Reproductive justice”? That might be a new one. Hold on; I’ll add it to the list.
And I wish to add that I, too, believe that people off all races enjoy an equal right to reproduce!