Aftermath of The Tuskegee Experiment

     The United States has a unique cultural history involving African Americans and their reticence to be involved with the medical system. It has a lot to do with something that is commonly called, "The Tuskegee Experiment," run by the US Public Health Service. If you don't know about it already, at the historic black Tuskegee University in 1932 they recruited 600 black sharecroppers from Macon Alabama, 399 of which had latent syphilis, and 201 were the control group. The doctors did not actually treat them for their STD, the doctors allowed the syphilis to run unchecked, and allowed it to spread to their wives, their children, and when their children grew up, they allowed the disease to spread to their husbands and wives, and to their children as well.

     The doctors claimed that they were providing free medical care and free burials for the black sharecroppers and their families, but only placebos were ever offered, even when penicillin came out and became the standard of care to cure syphilis in the 1950s it was never offered to them. The study was intended to last 6 months, but ended up being extended to 40 years, so from 1932 to 1972 the doctors at Tuskegee University experimented on the men, their wives, their children and their grandchildren, treating all of them like lab rats. The study was offically called the, “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.”

     Some African Americans were alive when the Associated Press broke the story about The Tuskegee Experiment in 1972 and some still remember it, and they have told their children and their grandchildren, which is why 60% of African Americans in 2020 said that they didn't trust vaccines, and another 20% said they had serious concerns about them. It is also why African-Americans seek medical treatment far less than their white counterparts for a variety of diseases, due to a general distrust of the U.S. medical system and doctors, including black doctors, because many of the doctors at Tuskegee that experimented on the sharecroppers, their wives, their children, and their grandchildren were black.

     How do you know, if you're an African American, that the government of the United States is finally treating you like an equal human being? First there was slavery from before the founding of the country until the end of the Civil War and the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments were ratified. The 13th freed the slaves other than prisoners convicted by courts in 1865, the 14th granted all former black slaves citizenship rights in 1868, and the 15th gave all free black men the right to vote in 1870.

     Then after slavery ended and African Americans had the right to vote, the North kept troops in the South until 1877, a period called the Reconstruction Era, and Southern states with majority black populations voted majority black legislatures into office, and there were black representatives and black senators in Congress from Southern states. When the northern troops pulled out and returned rule to the white Southerners, almost immediately former Confederate States enacted various literacy tests, poll taxes, and poll questions like, "How many bubbles are in a bar of soap?" to exclude African Americans from voting, collectively called, "Jim Crow Laws."

     Within ten years of the troop withdrawal only 1% of African Americans in Louisiana that had qualified a decade earlier still qualified to vote, and the senators and representatives from the south became white again, and the KKK lynched blacks and whites that supported black voting rights. If former Confederate states didn't already have anti-miscegeny laws or anti-race-mixing laws they had all passed them by this time.

     Then in 1896 the Supreme Court of the United States decided in Plessy vs Ferguson that racial segregation would be the law of the land, and that, "separate but equal," was legal, even if things really were not equal, and segregation became the law in all spheres of life in the United States, not just in the former Confederate slave states.

     When women gained the right to vote in the United States in 1920 with the 19th amendment, black women in the former Confederate states were instantly disenfranchised through the Jim Crow Laws, and did not start to get their voting rights until black American males in the South started to legally regain their voting rights after the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

     And the state laws prohibiting so-called race mixing would legally exist in the United States until 1967 when the Supreme Court decided in Loving vs Virginia that a "white" adult and a "colored" adult of the opposite sex could legally marry, ending racial purity and anti-miscegeny laws in the former slave states and in Indiana; and then it took the equal housing provision in the Civil Rights Act of 1968 to end legal racial segregation in the United States, finally and fully reversing Plessy versus Ferguson, 100 years after former black slaves gained citizenship rights in the United States.

     Through all of this they continued The Tuskegee Experiment, even after Brown versus Board of Education said that separate was not equal in 1954 they continued the experiment. Even after the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and then the Civil Rights Act of 1968 they brazenly continued to experiment on the former sharecroppers, their families, and their descendants, all the way up until they were exposed by the Associated Press in 1972.

     For African Americans it is not a lack of access to quality affordable health care that keeps them from going to the doctor as much as their white counterparts, it is a lack of trust in the government that keeps them from seeking medical treatment, including getting vaccines, and it is more than naive to not know that The Tuskegee Experiment even happened, or how it causes continued distrust in the American medical system among African Americans to this day.