The Tuskegee Experiment (1932-1972) was a 40-year American government study of the effects of untreated syphilis on black men. “Untreated” is the key word: when a cure for the disease was found in the 1940s, none of the men were allowed to receive it, not even to save their lives or stop them from going mad.
It sounds like some cruel Nazi experiment. And yet it went on even after laws were passed in the late 1940s to prevent cruel Nazi experiments!
Of the 399 men in the study 128 died directly or indirectly from the disease. They spread it to 40 of their wives who in turn gave it to 19 of their children.
At least as early as 1966 some within the government began to question the study on moral grounds. But the CDC (Center for Disease Control) defended it and the study went on. It did not stop until 1972 when it made the front page of the New York Times.
Even then the doctor who led the study still defended it saying:
The men’s status did not warrant ethical debate. They were subjects, not patients; clinical material, not sick people.
The NAACP took the government to court for the families affected and won $9 million and free medical care.
Because of stuff like this at least a third of blacks in America believe that the government is somehow behind Aids.
The men in the study were tricked and lied to from the very beginning. They never told them they had syphilis, just “bad blood”. They got them to agree to spinal taps by calling it a “special free treatment”. Taking advantage of their poverty, they promised them free medical treatment and free hot meals.
But the truth is during the main part of the study there never was any true treatment because that was the whole point: to see how untreated syphilis affects black men.
It was modelled on a 1928 study done on white men in Oslo, Norway. But in that study no one was prevented from getting treatment: they merely found men who had not received treatment for whatever reason and asked questions about the course of the disease.
To us a separate study for black men seems pointless but to whites at the time it did not: they were racist enough to believe that syphilis affects black men differently somehow.
In 1992 Dr David Feldshuh wrote a play about the study, “Miss Evers’ Boys”, which HBO made into a film in 1997 starring Alfre Woodard and Laurence Fishburne.
That same year the president said:
What was done cannot be undone. But we can end the silence. We can stop turning our heads away. We can look at you in the eye and finally say on behalf of the American people, what the United States government did was shameful, and I am sorry … To our African American citizens, I am sorry that your federal government orchestrated a study so clearly racist.