The following was submitted by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
In rural Alabama, the men were told they
were being treated for rheumatism, bad stomachs, or "bad blood." They
were promised free meals and free health care.
They didn't get the health care they
needed most.
Hundreds of men — mostly poor, all of
them black — were recruited in 1932 for the infamous Tuskegee Study of
Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male. They were never told they were to be the
subjects of a secret U.S. Public Health Service experiment. They were never
informed that they had been diagnosed with syphilis. And they never received
treatment.
Instead, they were "simply being
watched until they died and their bodies examined for the ravages of the
disease," as DeNeen
L. Brown wrote for The Washington Post this week. The study continued
for 40 years and ended only when Peter Buxtun, an investigator for the health
service, blew the whistle in 1972.
"Their faces were so red; they told
me, 'We're learning a lot of important information, and then waited for me to
apologize," said
Buxtun, recalling his superiors' reactions to his whistleblowing. "But I
had copies of the CDC reports, and I knew they were treating people like
cattle."
Earlier this week, an SPLC staffer went
to Tuskegee to attend a ceremony marking the 20th anniversary of President Clinton's
apology to the then-eight remaining survivors of the study. "The United
States government did something that was wrong — deeply, profoundly, morally
wrong," Clinton
said. "What was done cannot be undone. But we can end the silence. We
can look you in the eye and say what the United States government did was
shameful."
It wasn't the first shameful act of
medical injustice the government had perpetrated. Beginning in the 1920s,
countless women were forced to undergo sterilization under threat of losing
welfare benefits. Some young women, like the Relf sisters of Montgomery,
Alabama – just 40 miles from Tuskegee – were simply sterilized without their
knowledge or consent.
Minnie Lee Relf was 14 and her sister
Mary Alice was 12 when doctors working with a federal welfare agency told their
mother that they were going to be given routine shots. Instead, the doctors
performed tubal ligations on both girls.
The
SPLC sued the federal government in 1972, forcing it to halt the
sterilization program and prompting a federal judge to prohibit the use of
federal funds for this purpose.
It took a lawsuit to halt the Tuskegee
syphilis study, too, even after Buxtun leaked information about it to the
press. Fred Gray, the civil rights lawyer who defended Rosa Parks, desegregated
Alabama public schools and forced the state to let civil rights activists march
from Selma to Montgomery, filed a class action lawsuit in 1973 on behalf of the
men who were the study's unwitting participants.
"The federal government thought
enough to get pictures [of the participants] as subjects," said
Gray, speaking at this week's ceremony in Tuskegee to mark the anniversary
of the presidential apology. "It didn't think enough to get their names as
men."
Many of the subjects of the syphilis
experiment, in fact, remain unknown. The Tuskegee History Center is launching a
new initiative to try to identify every man.
"We have to continue to tell their
story," said
Gray, "so that such injustices never happen again."
You can see some pictures from this week’s
ceremony here.
