African Americans and birth control  The history of African American women and their participation in the birth control movement reflects a very conflicted set of ideals regarding African American women, the use of contraceptive practices and abortion. Prominent historical figures debated whether African American communities would benefit from birth control or if birth control was another methodical scheme put in place to suppress the African American community. During slavery times in the United States, black slave women were viewed as "breeding slaves" and "child bearing women"—simply vessels to meet the demands for labor in Southern agricultural areas. Through arranged marriages and forced mating with other slaves along with direct rape from slave owners, slave women were subject to frequent sexual exploitation. The women were even blamed for these phenomena as white male masters developed the "Jezebel" stereotype of black women as passionate, hypersexual beings who wanted to engage in sexual acts with anyone and everyone. In resistance to slavery and specifically sexual oppression, black slave women often resorted to their own forms of abortion and contraception. Southern physician E. M. Pendleton reported that plantation owners frequently complained about "the unnatural tendency in the African female population to destroy her offspring. Whole families of women ... fail to have any children." The women drew upon African folk remedies to concoct medicines that would be shared and spread throughout the slave women community. After the slavery era, black women mobilized in a variety of African American women's clubs across the nation to exercise their beliefs within a political platform. Prominent African American women leaders such as Harriet Tubman, Frances E.W. Harper, Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, and Mary Church Terrell led the founding of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs. As issues of racism, segregation and discrimination perpetrated life for African Americans in post-slavery America, the NACWC and its 1,500 affiliate clubs worked to promote "racial uplift with the motto of "Lifting as We Climb," aspiring to show "an ignorant and suspicious world that our aims and interests are identical with those of all good aspiring women." Along with fundraising to establish schools and community services, the NACWC endorsed the movement for birth control as part of its agenda to empower black women and help them achieve better lives. The black community of Harlem was particularly interested in birth control for women, and in 1918, the Women's Political Association of Harlem was the first African American women's club to schedule lectures on birth control. Their efforts continued with the Harlem Community Forum inviting Margaret Sanger to speak in March 1923 and the Urban League asking the American Birth Control League to establish a birth control clinic in the city.