Carrie Mae Covington was born in 1908 to a family of sharecroppers in Rockingham, North Carolina. Her father wanted her to join the family business, but all Carrie saw was a dead end. When she was 24, the man she loved asked for her hand in marriage, but her dad told him to get off his porch or he would shoot. So Carrie got on a bus bound for Baltimore and eloped. After she arrived, she cut off her long braid and mailed it, along with her marriage license, to her father as a way of saying, "I'm free."
Earlier this year, Carrie's granddaughter, Alexis McGill Johnson—the president and CEO of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America—followed in her grandmother's footsteps by charting a bold path for herself. In an opinion piece published in
The New York Times, McGill Johnson reckoned with the organization's founder Margaret Sanger's association with white supremacists and eugenics, writing, "In the name of political expedience, [Sanger] chose to engage white supremacists to further her cause. In doing that, she devalued and dehumanized people of color." She went on to connect Sanger's legacy to present-day systemic racism in health care, promising that under her leadership Planned Parenthood would closely examine how it may have perpetuated its founder's harms. "What we don't want to be, as an organization, is a Karen," McGill Johnson wrote. "And sometimes, that's how Planned Parenthood has acted. By privileging whiteness, we've contributed to America harming Black women and other women of color."
Calling out a long dead founder is one thing; calling the organization you currently lead a Karen in the nation's most prominent newspaper is another.
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