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  • 2015-09-30 (xsd:date)
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  • Does a Photograph Show Planned Parenthood's Founder at a KKK Rally? (en)
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  • A controversy in mid-2015 regarding Planned Parenthood and the purported sale of fetal tissue ignited many social media debates about reproductive health, and among the many threads of discussion were numerous claims about Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger. A common assertion about Sanger's legacy holds that her efforts to afford women (and families) expanded reproductive agency were racist in nature (as demonstrated by a rumor holding that Sanger once described people of color as weeds that ought to be exterminated). The 2015 Planned Parenthood controversy debate was peppered with postings of a photograph alongside myriad claims that it documented Sanger's addressing Ku Klux Klan members (presumably to garner support for her endeavors among violent extremists with whom she shared a vision of white supremacy): Unlike other tidbits of lore that have since evolved to paint Sanger as unapologetically racist, the veracity of the photograph depicting her addressing female KKK members was easily determined. An original version of the photograph in question was uploaded to the white supremacist web site Stormfront in February 2008, and it shows that the original image featured a lit cross that was edited out and replaced with an picture of Sanger: Viewers confused about the image's veracity could be partially excused, as the blog with which it appeared to have originated (ostensibly fabricated to illustrate a point) was offline by the time the photograph began circulating widely in 2015 (although an archived copy of that blog post can be seen here). The quote that inspired the photograph was itself a falsehood. With its original context largely erased from the Internet, the doctored photograph gained traction among Planned Parenthood's detractors. By September 2015, the image had been merged with a backstory that had no connection to the original photograph: Although the image was a fabrication, it did include a grain of (distorted) truth in its assertion that Sanger once addressed female KKK members in Silver Lake, New Jersey: While Sanger did speak to such an audience in 1926, she didn't hold the group in the highest esteem, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke favorably of her at the height of the U.S. civil rights movement:In short, Sanger once addressed female KKK members in a bid to have her message heard as widely as possible, but she both openly described that meeting and disparaged the group's mission in her writings, and a photograph supposedly depicting that talk (or a similar one) is fabricated. (en)
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