By: Emily Simons

Debate continues on the Stephen Foster statue, still located on Forbes Avenue near Schenely park. The statue, long controversial in Pittsburgh, gained notable attention after the Confederate statue protests throughout the American South earlier this summer. This statue depicts white American song writer Stephen Foster sitting above a black banjo player, the supposed recreation of a character from Foster’s song “Old Black Joe”, wearing ragged clothes sitting on a tree stump. The author of “Oh! Susanna” and “Camptown Races”, Foster was born on July 4th, 1826 in Lawrenceville, he went on to have a career in parlor and minstrel music.
Foster penned songs about the American south, yet he never lived there. It’s not even known if he crossed the Mason-Dixon Line. As a white song writer, he contributed to the popular and long rooted misrepresentation of Black Americans during the mid to late 1800s through the minstrel shows he helped create. Foster’s songs are rife with stereotyping and mischaracterizing Black Americans’ experiences before and during the Civil War. Foster died in 1864 (buried in Allegheny Cemetery), 36 years before Giuseppe Moretti created his controversial statue in 1900. Little is known to why Moretti created such a statue, but his Pittsburgh works of “art” were funded by the City Government and Edward Manning Bigelow. Now, the Pittsburgh Art Commission wrestles with what to do with this statue. Neither the University of Pittsburgh nor Carnegie Mellon University (schools closest to the statue) want to take it in, but Stephen Foster’s statue will not remain in the current location for long. While Chatham students await updates on what will happen with Foster, they can look towards correcting the complicated past; the Margaret Sanger Lecture Hall in Coolidge.
Margaret Sanger left behind a complex legacy which no one completely agrees on. Born in 1879, Sanger went on to become a writer, nurse, birth control activist, and eugenics supporter. Before I present the complex story, let me make it clear that Sanger never attended Chatham or lived in Pittsburgh. In 1916, she opened the first birth control clinic and in 1921 started the American Birth Control League which would evolve into Planned Parenthood. In her speeches and writing, you need not read between the lines to see her thinking. In her 1921 speech “The Morality of Birth Control” she divides society into three groups, with the third group being the “irresponsible and reckless ones having little regard for the consequence of their acts.” She goes on to say, “many of this group are diseased, feeble-minded, and are of the pauper element” and that “the procreation of this group should be stopped.” She concludes stating “We desire to stop at its source the disease, poverty and feeble mindedness, and insanity which exist today, for these lower the standards of civilization and make for race deterioration.” Need I say more. This is only one of many instances in which Sanger shows support for eugenics.
Some disagree stating that her support was a ploy to gain acceptance for birth control. Gloria Steinem even wrote an essay for The Times about this theory in 1998. Margaret Sanger would go on to condemn the use of eugenics by the Nazis, but that’s a pretty low standard to reach. Both Salon and The Washington Post have mentioned that her support for general eugenics isn’t as bad as just targeting minority communities and that it was a popular idea back then. Again, a terrible excuse.
Realistically, Sanger has no place at Chatham. Why involve ourselves in the complicated history of this woman. Our institution has seen thousands of women, not just Rachel Carson, graduate and become successful alumnae. Even if Chatham can’t decide on someone to name the Lecture Hall after, they can just give it another number.