The conflict between a national group of black ministers and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG) is heating up over the pastors’ call for the removal of a bust and all images of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger – a known racist and eugenicist – from the gallery.

Ministers Taking a Stand, led by president Bishop E.W. Jackson, a Marine Corps veteran, retired attorney, graduate of Harvard Law School, and senior fellow for the Family Research Council, sent a letter last week to Kim Sajet, director of the NPG, asking for the removal of Sanger’s likeness “from all National Portrait Gallery exhibits.”

The letter stated:

Perhaps the Gallery is unaware that Ms. Sanger supported black eugenics, a racist attitude toward black and other minority babies; an elitist attitude toward those she regarded as “the feeble minded;” speaking at rallies of Ku Klux Klan women; and communications with Hitler sympathizers. Also, the notorious “Negro Project” which sought to limit, if not eliminate, black births, was her brainchild. Despite these well-documented facts of history, her bust sits proudly in your gallery as a hero of justice. The obvious incongruity is staggering! Perhaps your institution is a victim of propaganda advanced by those who support abortion. Nevertheless, a prestigious institution like the National Portrait Gallery should have higher standards and subject its honorees to higher scrutiny… Like Hitler, Sanger advocated eugenics – the extermination of people she deemed “undesirables.” Finding that the American people rejected that idea, she then switched to birth control as a way of controlling the population growth of black people and others.

In an interview with Breitbart News, Jackson said his group received a response from the NPG, which referred to Sanger as a person who struggled for justice because she tried to make birth control and reproductive freedom available to poor women.

“We responded back that this was not Sanger’s motivation,” Jackson asserts. “Her motivation was stopping people whom she considered ‘defective’ from having what she would call ‘defective children.’”

“She thought that black people needed to be stopped from propagating and growing their population, and other people she called ‘feeble-minded,’” he adds. “And the analogy I drew is that’s like saying, ‘Hitler might have been controversial, but at least he helped population control.’”

Jackson said his organization next plans “on the ground action.”

“We are not happy at all with the response we’ve received,” he states. “We consider it disrespectful and not serious. We’re meeting with a number of black pro-life organizations and others to plan our next step.”

“We are going to the National Portrait Gallery,” he explains, adding:

We have a petition signed by over 9,000 people at this time. We’ll present the petition to the gallery and personally demand that they remove Margaret Sanger’s bust and all images of her from the “Struggle for Justice” exhibit – which includes, by the way, Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks!

Jackson said the fact Sanger is held in high esteem is “outrageous.”

“We will not rest until it’s taken down,” he asserts. “We want to make sure that everybody in America knows who Margaret Sanger actually was. We think that will put Planned Parenthood and what they do in the proper perspective and I hope this will be one more nail in the coffin of Planned Parenthood.”

Asked by Breitbart News how President Obama could be supportive of Planned Parenthood – founded by a racist – when he and his administration seem to cite racism continuously as the cause of much of what is wrong with this country, Jackson said, “Racism is only an evil to the Obama administration and those that support it when it helps their ideology and their cause. Otherwise, it should be ignored. We see that again and again.”

“This president has demonstrated such a callous, disregard for human life,” Jackson continues. “It’s almost unfathomable to me, but, of course, it’s in keeping with his record. He opposed the Born Alive Infant Protection Act – and that was nothing but infanticide, and he supported that! It doesn’t surprise me, but it still is unbelievable that a president could think that way.”

The call to remove Sanger’s bust comes following the release of multiple undercover investigative videos, produced by the Center for Medical Progress, in which top Planned Parenthood medical officials explain the harvesting of the body parts of aborted babies for potential sale to biomedical companies.

Ryan Bomberger, chief creative officer of The Radiance Foundation, is supporting Ministers Take a Stand. In a statement to Breitbart News, Bomberger said, “Museums educate the public about history. The NPG, however, wants to create a dangerous and fictionalized version of it.”

“Planned Parenthood was born in eugenic racism and elitism, and Margaret Sanger was the mother who gave birth to the world’s largest abortion chain,” he continued. “In the city where Planned Parenthood began, more black babies are aborted than born alive according to the New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. This is not the result of justice. It’s the result of animus.”

Regarding the notion that the institutional left upholds Planned Parenthood, founded by a racist, yet cites racism as the downfall of the United States, Bomberger said, “Liberals find racism in every institution of American life, except in the one industry that kills for a living.”

“Abortion is the number one killer in the black community (363,705 abortions versus 285,522 deaths from all causes of death combined),” he added. “Yet the propagandistic and hypocritical #BlackLivesMatter movement leadership stands with Planned Parenthood, proving that only some black lives matter.”

Presidential candidate and retired pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson said Wednesday that Planned Parenthood puts “most of their clinics in black neighborhoods” so they can “control that population.”

Appearing with Fox News Channel’s Neil Cavuto, Carson, an African-American, said, “I think people should go back and read about Margaret Sanger, who founded this place – a woman who Hillary Clinton, by the way, says she admires. Look and see what many people in Nazi Germany thought about her.”

Dr. Elizabeth Lee Vliet of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), quotes Sanger: “Colored people are like human weeds and are to be exterminated…Slaves, Latin, and Hebrew immigrants are…a deadweight of human waste. Blacks, soldiers, and Jews are a menace to the (human) race.”

“[Sanger’s] legacy of Planned Parenthood has cost the lives of over 57 million babies since 1973, with over 13 million of them African-American babies,” Vliet continues. “That makes Planned Parenthood the leader in Black Genocide. Over 80% of Planned Parenthood abortions are either Black or Hispanic babies.”