The Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Fred Gray
in society and culture. Of course, when I speak to schoolchildren today, I am always a little startled by the realization that almost two generations have now reached adulthood in Alabama with no personal knowledge of “colored” water fountains, Jim Crow public accommodations, racial restrictions on voting and jury service, and so forth. This is not to say that all racial problems have been solved, but simply to acknowledge that the South of today is light-years from what it was in 1932.
The part of Alabama which extends from east central Alabama, where Macon County is located, on through Montgomery, Lowndes, Wilcox, Dallas, Sumter, Greene, and Pickens counties to the Mississippi line, is called “the Black Belt.” All of these counties have a majority black population, and many people think the Black Belt is called that because of its demographics. The name was actually bestowed by geologists because of the area’s rich, dark soil composition. Nevertheless, while the dark soil was exceptionally fertile, its richness was realized largely through the labor of dark Alabamians. Coincidentally, the name of my publisher, Black Belt Press, is also derived from this region of Alabama which is well-known for its distinctive geographic and socio-political characteristics. Because most people outside Alabama associate “black belts” with martial arts, Black Belt Press prints an explanatory statement (see page 4) in every book it publishes. This statement is a good summary of the culture of the place and hints at the societal extremes—“it was and is a place of great beauty, of extreme wealth and grinding poverty, of pain and joy”—which have existed virtually since Alabama became a state in 1819.
As a center of cotton culture, the Black Belt had a high African American population from the time the first European settlers arrived, bringing with them African slaves. Some of the richest land in Macon County had been a part of the Creek Nation until the cessions of 1832. After the removal of the Indians—another tragic episode in American history—planters and slaves poured into the area. This was a result of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which authorized the President to negotiate with the Indian tribes east of the Mississippi River for the purchase of their land. The Choctaw, Creek, Tuskegee, Eufaula, Coosa, Alabama, Koweta, Kashita, and other Native American tribes and languages had been early occupants of what is now the State of Alabama. Ultimately, many Indians were isolated far from their fertile homelands on barren, barely habitable land in various desolate areas of the western United States.
Prosperity in Macon County did not last, however, because by 1850 the harsh agricultural practices of the time had “farmed out” some of the best cropland. Between the agricultural decline and the upheaval of the Civil War, Macon County actually lost population in the middle third of the nineteenth century. Still, after emancipation, most of the former slaves stayed in the area and continued to till the soil as sharecroppers or tenant farmers or simply as hired laborers for the white landowners. By 1930, Macon County’s population was 27,103, of which 22,320 were African American. According to government statistics, the average income in Macon County was only one to two dollars a day. The 1940 census showed that there were 5,205 farm dwelling units in the county, of which 4,500 were in need of major repairs, had no running water, no electricity, and no toilet within the structure.
In other words, conditions were bad in Macon County in 1932. There were only two incorporated towns, Tuskegee and Notasulga. The Great Depression had begun, and it was harder than ever to earn a living.
Racial Conditions in Alabama
Another very important element which must be considered is the racial climate in Alabama from 1932 to 1954. At that time, in Alabama and throughout the South, everything was rigidly segregated based on race. The laws of the State of Alabama required the complete separation of whites and blacks in public accommodations and in almost all other aspects of life. The United States Supreme Court held in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) that the State of Louisiana could segregate passengers by race on trains traveling in that State so long as the facilities were substantially equal. This was the beginning of the doctrine of “separate but equal,” though in practice the result was separate but unequal because facilities provided for “coloreds” rarely if ever were the same as those provided for whites. In 1938, the Court extended that doctrine to education in the case of Gaines v. Canada, ex rel. We were thus plagued with “separate but equal” until May 17, 1954. On that day, the Supreme Court held in Brown v. Board of Education that separate educational facilities were inherently unequal and that the doctrine of “separate but equal” had no place in the field of education. However, when the Study started, segregation was the law of the land.
In addition, during the beginning and extending into the early phase of the Study, African Americans were still being lynched with sickening regularity. The lives of African Americans in Alabama during that period of time were not worth very much. It was during this time also that the infamous Scottsboro Boys Case was making headlines in Alabama and across the nation. This is a case in which two white women accused several African Americans of raping them in north Alabama. Ultimately, in a trial which legal experts have considered biased and based on suspect evidence, the accused were convicted and given life sentences. Several died in prison; one, late in life, was granted a pardon. The point is, that given the racial conditions of the day, it was not difficult for the average white person in Alabama to participate in the Study of untreated syphilis on African American men.
Tuskegee Institute
Because of the existence of Tuskegee Institute, led by Booker T. Washington, there were a larger than average number of well-educated, what would now be called middle-class, African Americans living in Tuskegee. Yet most of the African Americans in Macon County were not middle-class professionals. Most were farmers, a few on their own land but usually on land owned by the white minority. This was still a cotton culture, and cotton culture throughout the Deep South was originally based on slavery and then on tenancy and sharecropping. By the time the Tuskegee Syphilis Study began in 1932, Professor George Washington Carver had already made Tuskegee Institute even more famous by his scientific experiments in agriculture, particularly in developing many uses for peanuts and sweet potatoes. As Robert J. Norrell writes in his book, Reaping the Whirlwind, about Tuskegee’s civil rights history, Carver’s work had not yet changed the dominant agricultural model in Macon County:
The Institute’s efforts to improve farming practices apparently benefited black farmers in Macon County only marginally. Charles S. Johnson, the prominent sociologist at Fisk University, surveyed 612 black farm families in the county in the early 1930s and found that little had changed for the better for black farmers since the end of slavery. Indeed, many things had gotten worse: Land ownership had declined relentlessly. More and more black farmers had become sharecroppers, deepening their dependence on white landlords; ninety percent of those surveyed were tenants. They all told him the same thing: sharecropping allowed almost no room for blacks to improve themselves. “They manage to live on advances,” Johnson wrote, “or by borrowing for food and clothing and permitting their crop to be taken in satisfaction of the debt.” For the black tenant, there was very little of the independence that Booker Washington had envisioned. “When you working on a white man’s place,” one man told Johnson, “you have to do what he says, or treat, trade or travel.” The tenant system belied the earlier faith in the curative power of education for blacks: Johnson discovered that black men with more than an elementary education were likely to quit farming altogether. The most successful tenant farmers were those with a bare minimum of education—the ones literate enough to make the best of the situation, but not so well educated as to view it as intolerable.
This was a brutal economic model. That sharecroppers were not far removed from slavery was also pointed out by H. L. Mitchell, one of the founders of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, in his autobiography, Mean Things Happening in This Land. He describes what this life was like:
For a sharecropper, the day started before dawn. The plantation bell was the first sound he heard upon awakening. His wife was soon getting a fire going in the cookstove. A cup of cheap coffee started the day off. She put biscuits in the oven to be eaten with molasses and fat back meat by the adults. There was cornmeal mush for the young ones. First the man would go to the plantation barn where the hostler assigned a mule to him. He harnessed it and was in the cotton field before sun was up. The day’s work was well underway by sunrise, and it didn’t end until after sundown. The plantation riding boss would be in the field supervising