The Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Fred Gray
work. I will always be thankful to him and to the members of the staff of Black Belt Press.
Thanks also to the following persons who have read, edited, and given valuable assistance: my brothers, Dr. Abdullah H. Ghandhistani, Judge Thomas W. Gray, and Hugh C. Gray; my sister, Pearl Gray Daniels; and my children, Deborah, Vanessa, Fred Jr., and Stanley.
I am appreciative to Charlie Pollard for coming into my office on July 27, 1972. Without Mr. Pollard’s request for legal assistance, the story of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study might have been short-lived and justice for the participants might never have been obtained.
I express my gratefulness to Mr. Herman Shaw, who in recent years has served as spokesman for all of the participants, both living and deceased. I am appreciative to the other 621 men who unknowingly risked their lives in order to help their country in a health care program. I am also appreciative to the family members of the men who have helped me over the years. As a result of their participation, I am committed to keeping their story alive, and to preserve their contributions and the contributions of others in the field of human and civil rights through the Tuskegee Human and Civil Rights Multicultural Center. A portion of the proceeds from this book will go to the Center.
I also thank Jewell Handy Gresham Nemiroff, president of the Hansberry-Nemiroff Fund, who called me after the airing of Miss Evers’ Boys to express her concern over that production. Mrs. Nemiroff has been consistently supportive and helpful.
Finally, thanks to my friends Robert Burton and James Upshaw for listening, reading, and generally encouraging me to complete this book. We discussed it almost daily during lunch.
Note
1 - The forerunner company of the present publisher, NewSouth Books, where Williams is editor-in-chief and still my editor.
1
In July 1972, while flying from Washington, D.C., home to Montgomery, I was reading the newspaper when my eye was caught by an article about a medical experiment in my adopted hometown of Tuskegee, Alabama. The article, by Associated Press reporter Jean Heller, described how the study was initiated by the United States Public Health Service in 1932 with the intent of collecting data about the effects of untreated syphilis. According to the article, the study used as subjects some six hundred African American males from the rural areas in and around Macon County, of which Tuskegee is the county seat. More than half of the 623 men had syphilis; the others, a control group, did not.
Over the next few days, additional articles and broadcast reports provided more details. These reports floored me for several reasons.
I was shocked to learn that the study had been going on for forty years. I was born and reared in an adjacent county, and I started handling cases in Macon County soon after I passed the Alabama Bar exam and hung out my shingle in 1954. I had opened a law office in Tuskegee in 1958, had been living there since 1965, and had represented the county in the state legislature. Tuskegee is not a big place. In 1972, the population of the county was only twenty-five thousand, and I had probably shaken the hands of half of them. Yet I had never heard of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. It was astounding to me that such a study could have avoided public discussion for forty years. I later learned that the medical research community was quite familiar with the study, but that certainly was not the case with the general public.
Secondly, the news story, brief as it was, outlined what could only be viewed as an alarming atrocity and yet another example of racial injustices perpetrated by government in segregated Alabama. In this case, not by the state of Alabama, but by the federal government. Syphilis is an equal-opportunity disease. It can be transmitted from black or white genitals just the same, and it equally ravages black or white neural systems, brains, hearts, and other organs. Yet each of the 623 study subjects was an African American male. Furthermore, they were predominantly poor, uneducated, and, in rural Alabama in 1932, would have been extremely unsophisticated about medical treatment in general. As I said, I was shocked, but I was hardly surprised. I had witnessed many areas where African Americans had been treated unjustly. This case was simply especially appalling because it was officially sanctioned by the federal government and involved life or death situations for several hundred United States citizens.
Thirdly, effective treatment was knowingly and systematically withheld from those suffering from a potentially fatal disease. Putting aside the apparent problems with how the participants were selected, one could see the original rationale behind the Study, for when it began in the thirties, there was no effective cure for syphilis. But by the 1940s, penicillin had been discovered and found to be highly effective as a treatment for syphilis. By the end of World War II, penicillin was a readily available and relatively inexpensive cure for syphilis. Yet for another two decades, officials in charge of this study deliberately withheld treatment from the diseased majority of its participants. I thought it was a tragedy that these poor rural men in my county had suffered such an injustice.
On July 27, 1972, Mr. Charlie Pollard, a Macon County farmer, came into my office and asked if I had read about the men who were involved in the tests for “bad blood.” He said he was one of the men. He then related that a few days before, he was at a stockyard in Montgomery and a newspaper woman found him and engaged him in a conversation about his involvement in a health program in Tuskegee since back in the thirties. The reporter asked if he knew Eunice Rivers, the nurse who worked with the men in the testing program from the beginning to end. He stated that he did.
Mr. Pollard related to me in detail his involvement. His statement confirmed the news reports I had been reading and watching on television. As a result of our discussion, I agreed to represent Mr. Pollard in a lawsuit against the government and any others we might discover who were legally responsible for operating and maintaining the study. That is how I became involved as the attorney for the plaintiffs in what became known as Pollard v. United States of America, a class action lawsuit filed in federal court in Montgomery.
In the following chapters, I will tell the story of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, beginning with some background about Macon County. This background is necessary to understanding the time period and setting of the study; the origins and methodology of the study itself; and the filing of the lawsuit, its supporting investigation, the judicial settlement that resulted, and the follow-up legal efforts to locate the participants and their heirs in order to pay them their part of the settlement. Then, I will relate some of what has happened to these men and their case in the years since, especially the renewed media attention of recent years, as well as the unprecedented events of May 1997 when the President of the United States met with some of the study survivors at the White House and publicly apologized to them on behalf of the nation. Finally, I will describe the proposal to build a memorial center in Tuskegee as a legacy to the study participants and to those of all races, particularly Native Americans, European Americans, and African Americans, who have contributed to the unique history and culture of Tuskegee and Macon County, Alabama. This legacy includes legislative and regulatory actions to make sure that such a thing as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study cannot happen again.
2
A person who was not living in Tuskegee and Macon County in 1932 can hardly imagine what life was like at that time and place. It is hard even for me, and I was born in 1930, in Montgomery, the adjacent county southwest of Macon. To begin with, there were vast material differences. That was long before automatic transmissions in automobiles, televisions, and most of the modern conveniences that we take for granted today. Very few people had ever flown in an airplane. No one had ever heard of an interstate highway. In Macon County and similar rural parts of the Deep South in 1932, most people did not have plumbing, electricity, telephones, and cars, all of which are considered necessities of life now. It truly was a different world then.