Planned Parenthood of Greater New York will remove the name of the national organization’s founder, Margaret Sanger, from a Manhattan clinic in an attempt to reckon with her ties to the eugenics movement, the organization announced Tuesday.

An early feminist activist, Sanger is widely regarded as a pioneer in American reproductive rights. She opened the first birth control clinic in the United States more than a century ago, and helped create access to birth control for low-income, minority, and immigrant women. But she was also a vocal supporter of the now-discredited eugenics movement, which aimed to improve the human race through planned breeding based on genetic traits.

“The removal of Margaret Sanger’s name from our building is both a necessary and overdue step to reckon with our legacy and acknowledge Planned Parenthood’s contributions to historical reproductive harm within communities of color,” Karen Seltzer, chair of the board at Planned Parenthood of Greater New York, said in a statement. “Margaret Sanger’s concerns and advocacy for reproductive health have been clearly documented, but so too has her racist legacy.”

The New York chapter, which is one of the largest Planned Parenthood affiliates, also announced it is working to rename an honorary street sign that marks the “Margaret Sanger Square” at the intersection of Bleecker and Mott Streets in Manhattan.

The efforts are the first of many “organizational shifts” to confront Sanger’s legacy and institutional racism more broadly, the chapter said in a statement. Last month, the chapter’s chief executive, Laura McQuade, was ousted from her job after hundreds of former and current employees signed public letters accusing McQuade, who is white, of abusive behavior and a failure to address complaints about systemic racism, pay inequity and a lack of upward mobility for black staff – allegations McQuade denied.

The chapter’s move also comes amid nationwide calls to rename institutions and remove other tributes to racist historical figures in the aftermath of the deaths of George Floyd and other black Americans at the hands of police.

“Planned Parenthood, like many other organizations that have existed for a century or more, is reckoning with our history, and working to address historical inequities to better serve patients and our mission,” Melanie Roussell Newman, senior vice president of communications and culture for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement, commending the New York chapter for its decision.

The announcement marks a dramatic shift in the organization’s relationship with its founder, even as it has long acknowledged that Sanger’s views were problematic. In 2016, Planned Parenthood’s 100th anniversary, the organization published a lengthy fact sheet about Sanger, outlining her views on eugenics and describing her as “layered and complex” while defending her contributions.

Like many of her contemporaries at the time, Sanger supported the belief that it was possible to biologically create a better human race, said Esther Katz, a retired associate history professor at New York University and founder of the Margaret Sanger Papers Project. “But by better, she meant healthier, not morally better,” Katz said.

Sanger supported the sterilization of some people with mental illnesses, Katz said. She also believed that if a woman gave birth to too many children, the children would become weaker as the number of children grew. And in order to advance the birth control movement, she spoke with the Ku Klux Klan. But her views and actions have also often been taken out of context to claim Sanger wanted to “erase the black race,” Katz said.

“Margaret Sanger has been used as a tool for the anti-reproductive rights movement,” Katz said. “She was not trying to eliminate the African American race from this country.”

Sanger worked with Black leaders and ministers to give Black women the same access to birth control as white women, Katz said. She was single-mindedly focused on making birth control cheap and accessible to everybody.

“The problem with Sanger was she was so single minded that she was willing to align herself with anybody,” Katz said. “These are problematic positions. She did speak to the Klan. But I think obliterating her…doesn’t allow us to discuss this in any way or debate it.”

In recent years, antiabortion activists and conservatives have often brought up Sanger’s views on eugenics in order to criticize Planned Parenthood and the abortion rights movement, even though Sanger did not advocate for abortion rights. In an opinion last year, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas emphasized her eugenicist views and the fact that she opened a birth-control clinic in Harlem. He implied that Sanger wanted to restrict the growth of the Black community, which multiple scholars said was misleading. Ben Carson, now U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, has made similar claims.

Planned Parenthood and its founder have often become inaccurately intertwined in conversations about sterilization abuse that occurred in hospitals in the 1960s and later, abuse that disproportionately affected black and indigenous women, said Ayah Nuriddin, a PhD candidate in the department of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University who is writing her thesis on eugenics and the African American community. Nuriddin said it’s important to distinguish between the Sanger’s work and views and the later forms of state-sponsored sterilization.

“She’s racist, she’s eugenicist,” Nuriddin said. “That does not make her unique among her contemporaries in this period. I think there’s sometimes this notion that she’s somehow superlative in her racism, and that’s simply not the case.”

Merle McGee, chief equity and engagement officer for Planned Parenthood of Greater New York, said the organization has been having public conversations about Sanger’s complicated legacy for many years, and particularly since 2014.

“The Sanger legacy unchecked or unmet with a reckoning has been weaponized against women of color, and has effectively hampered our ability to be in a right relationship with women of color,” McGee said. “And we have left women of color to grapple with the totality of Sanger’s legacy.”

But taking Sanger’s name off a building does not mean the organization is completely disconnecting from its founder, she said.

“What we are saying is we are not going to center and essentialize Margaret Sanger as all good or all bad,” McGee said.

Nuriddin agreed it was important not to consider Sanger as either “a hero or a villain.”

“I think it’s also important to recognize that taking a name off or taking a statue down is not the whole story,” Nuriddin added, “and it’s not a substitute for reckoning with a complicated history.”

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