Page 10 The Skanner May 17, 2017
News
Tuskegee
many blacks had never
even seen a doctor. The
men were tested and
sorted into groups — 399
with syphilis and anoth-
er 201 who were not in-
fected.
The disease-free men
were used as a control
group. Health workers
told syphilitic fathers,
grandfathers,
sons,
brothers and uncles only
that they had “bad blood.”
None of the men was
asked to consent to take
part in a medical study.
They also weren’t told
that “bad blood” actual-
ly was a euphemism for
syphilis. Instead, doctors
purposely hid the study’s
purpose from the men,
subjecting them during
the study’s early months
to painful spinal taps and
blood tests.
Medical workers peri-
odically provided men
with pills and tonic that
made them believe they
were being treated, but
they weren’t. And doc-
tors never provided
them with penicillin
after it became the stan-
dard treatment for syph-
ilis in the mid-1940s.
The government pub-
lished occasional reports
on the study, including
findings which showed
the men with syphilis
were dying at a faster
rate than the uninfected.
But it’s doubtful any of
the men — or their wives,
girlfriends or other sex-
AP PHOTO/JAY REEVES
cont’d from pg 8
Tabitha Julkes lights a candle during a ceremony near Tuskegee,
Ala., on Monday, April 3, 2017, to commemorate the roughly 600
men who were subjects in the Tuskegee syphilis study. Julkes’ great-
grandfather Albert Julkes was a test subject, and she is among the
descendants of men who are now stepping forward publicly to tell
their stories.
ual partners — had any
idea what had happened
until an Associated Press
story was published na-
tionwide on July 26, 1972.
The next morning,
farmer and community
leader Charlie Pollard
walked into Fred Gray’s
law office in Tuskegee.
Gray already was a civ-
il rights legend by that
point: His clients includ-
ed Martin Luther King Jr.
and Rosa Parks following
her arrest in Montgom-
ery in 1955 for refusing
to give up her seat on a
city bus to a white man.
Pollard “came into my
office and asked me if I
had been reading in the
newspaper about the
men who were involved
in the syphilis tests for
‘bad blood,’” Gray wrote
in a memoir.
Pollard was among the
men in the study, and his
visit with Gray led to the
lawsuit and the multimil-
lion-dollar
settlement
reached with the govern-
ment on Aug. 28, 1975.
In all, Gray said in an
interview, government
documents showed 623
men were involved in the
study.
Payments to men and
their heirs differed based
on whether men were
infected or were in the
control group, whether
they were dead or alive.
Living participants who
had syphilis got $37,500;
heirs of deceased mem-
bers of the control group
received $5,000. Women
and children who were
infected with syphilis
got lifetime medical and
health benefits, and a
handful still survive, ac-
cording to the Centers
for Disease Control and
Prevention.
For decades, the study
has been widely blamed
for distrust among U.S.
blacks toward the medi-
cal community, particu-
larly clinical trials and
other tests. In medical
and public health circles,
it’s known as the “Tuske-
gee effect.”
Freddie Lee Tyson quit
the study during the
1950s after hearing rum-
blings that “something
was wrong,” Lille Head
said.
Unaffected
by
the
disease despite years
of being in the study’s
syphilitic group, Ty-
son learned the true
nature of the program
only when the rest of the
country found out, his
daughter said. His wife
and children all tested
negative for syphilis, but
Tyson was traumatized
and feared the disease
would show up some-
where in his family.
“After he found out
about it he had to live
with it. That could bring
a person down if he
wasn’t strong. He was
angry and he was upset,”
she said.
The lawsuit settled
years before, Tyson died
in 1988 at age 82 after an
automobile accident. To-
day, the 72-year-old Head
chairs Voices of our Fa-
thers Legacy Founda-
tion, a nonprofit organi-
zation formed in 2014 by
the men’s relatives to tell
the story of the victims of
the Tuskegee study.
Through the decades,
their loved ones have
been portrayed both as
unwitting victims of a
horrid experiment and
as ignorant hicks who
brought trouble on them-
selves with promiscuous
behavior. Many descen-
dants are still steamed
over a 1997 movie called
“Miss Evers Boys,” which
they believe cast the men
in a bad light. A big part
of the foundation’s pur-
pose is rounding out the
narrative of the men’s
lives by telling the story
of people like Freddie
Lee Tyson, Head said.
Descendants of the men
began gathering a year
or two after Clinton host-
ed five remaining test
survivors in the White
House. The meetings are
held in conjunction with
Tuskegee’s National Cen-
ter for Bioethics in Re-
search and Health Care,
established in 1999 to ad-
dress ethical and human
rights issues in science,
particularly concerning
minorities.
Read the rest of this story at
TheSkanner.com