Blacks 'Injected' With Syphilis? Never Happened

One peculiar footnote of the Jeremiah Wright controversy has been the repetition -- by educated black men on national television -- of a stubborn myth. That the U.S. government "injected black men with syphilis."

Rev. Wright said from the pulpit, in a video clip shown on Fox News: "The government lied about the Tuskegee experiment! They purposely infected African-American men with syphilis!"

Wright is wrong. That's not what the Tuskegee experiment was.

In the "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male," federal researchers refused to treat a group of black men who already had syphilis, long after a cure had been found.

Instead, doctors treated these men like laboratory animals, studying the course of the disease over decades.

The Tuskegee experiment was the most shameful episode in the history of the U.S. Public Health Service. President Bill Clinton apologized on behalf of the nation in 1997.

But the government did not infect black men with syphilis.

To invoke the Tuskegee experiment to suggest that the government invented AIDS to kill black people, as Rev. Wright did... that dishonors the truth. There is no excuse for it. It must stop.

Yet here's what Obery Hendricks, a professor at New York Theological Seminary, said on "The O'Reilly Factor" Monday night in defense of Rev. Wright: "We do know the government injected black men with syphilis."

On "Hardball with Chris Matthews" on Tuesday, journalist Ed Gordon said it's "not so far-fetched" to suppose that AIDS is weapon of genocide... considering that "the government was giving syphilis to black men."

Likewise, CNN contributor Roland Martin said last Friday: "I was watching another channel where they played a sermon where [Rev. Wright] said that America infected African-American men with
syphilis, called the Tuskegee experiment. That actually did, indeed, happen."

No. It. Did. Not.

And the only reason Obery Hendricks, Ed Gordon and Roland Martin weren't humiliated on national television is because Bill O'Reilly, Chris Matthews and Anderson Cooper are more ignorant about black history than they are.

I can't believe that none of those well-educated black gentlemen has read the highly praised book "Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment." Or seen the HBO movie "Miss Evers' Boys."

I recommend they do so before popping off again in public about the Tuskegee experiment. Same goes for Jeremiah Wright.

Comments

[lilithvine]

The real reason they (BLACK Males of the TUSKEGEE SYPHILIS EXPERIMENT) were chosen was that they were "poor, illiterate, and completely at the mercy of the Public Health System." In my opinion this had nothing to do with selection by race. They were in a part of the country where blacks lived.

Today it would be like going to Ohio and ending up in Holmes county selecting 200 people for your study ---in which case everyone would be Amish.

To prevent like atrocities in the future, the Government should mandatory continuing education of reading, health/ hygiene, and comprehension all through adulthood of blacks, since blacks think that they have been singled out. Black Leader's should be spending their money from their (social) Church pulpits to help other uneducated blacks and should also be in charge of such.

[MTGradwell]

Wright isn't exaggerating what occurred. He's downplaying it, letting the miscreants off the hook. Instead of bringing up the truly horrific crime which happened, he cites a lesser offence which did not. This muddying of the water is a mistake, but is the opposite of what Wright's accused of.

Think about it. "Federal researchers refused to treat a group of black men who already had syphilis, LONG AFTER A CURE HAD BEEN FOUND" (my emphasis). If those men HAD been deliberately infected, that would be a vile assault, but a relatively minor one. The victims could have been treated, and would eventually have emerged relatively unscathed, instead of dying horribly.

Some excuse this as "only" a failure to act. But the researchers weren't just doing nothing. They provided pills which they knew had no effect. They recorded progress, plotted charts, produced reports, and generally pretended to be doctors. This required rather more effort than just telling the victims the truth would have. How is that a crime of omission? Victims might have sought timely treatment if they hadn't thought they were already receiving it. They were actively dissuaded from getting help.

Furthermore, this had to be premeditated. It takes a special kind of viciousness to face someone you know is dying, who you could save simply by telling them the truth about their condition, and instead going through an elaborate charade resulting in their death. For it to happen year after year ... How can anyone not be angry about

[Rightiesrule]

The truth doesn't matter. It's how you feel about the subject and what might have happened. Anything that increases your feelings of being a victim is more important than some crazy thing like a fact.

[LeoMarvin]

You suggested the reason O'Reilly, Matthews and Cooper didn't embarrass their guests by pointing out that the government didn't give syphilis to black men, it just fooled them into thinking they were being treated for it, is because they knew as little about the actual history as their guests. Another possible explanation is that it's a distinction with no moral difference. Allowing those men to get sicker when the treatment was available and not to tell them there was even the possibility they were the "placibo" part of some test is every bit as reprehensible as injecting the disease into their veins. Yes, everyone should know the real facts, but some confusion over historical accuracy is worse than others. This one I wouldn't lose too much sleep over.

[jericho4119]

Long comment train and I have not made it through them all yet, but I did want to make this point: how about the women these men were having sex with?

[SaltySaltillo]

You mean their wives and children? Yeah, the women got syphilis too and the children were born with congenital syphilis.

[thinkb4uleap]

The righteously indignant /crusader for truth and justice tone of this piece is curiously ironic to me.

[moodyring]

Instead of, finding something useful to talk about, you've decided to write a post that essentially says, "some white s.o.b. doctors sat around, actively waiting for hundreds of black sharecroppers to die. But hey, it's not as bad as people say; they didn't directly infect them." Do you know how stupid your post sounds? Do you think the difference between whether some degenerates infected black people with syphilis or just sat there and watched makes any real difference in anyone's minds except white people who want to insist that things weren't "that bad" for black people?

[UndercoverBlackMan]

So, moodyring... you think that when we discuss the Tuskegee experiment, we should say: "The government infected black people with syphilis"? You have no problem at all with that?

[SaltySaltillo]

Well, I suppose Stalin didn't personally kill anyone during the Great Purge either. But that doesn't make him any less of a murderer does it?

[ESerafina42]

What was actually done WAS horrible. NO ONE is denying that. But no one is helping by disseminating false information. If what they are saying is debunked, why should people believe them when they tell the truth? That's why they should be scrupulously accurate.

[iswearington]

when you and your entire race is for 400 years is injected with the discrimination virus...whether or not you received your syphillis shot means nothing.

[tgood]

As bad as all this was, we can't go back and reverse history. With the danger this country is from near bankruptcy and an economy in crisis, a war seemingly without end , job losses, threats from rogue nations, don't you think we'd better stop walking with our heads turned backwards and all walk forward together to solve the most critical problems in the present ?

[Justtellthetruth]

I'm sorry, but I fail to see the difference between actively collecting and then tricking people of a certain race who have contracted a disease into believing that they ARE being treated, Giving them NOTHING when a %100 CURE is available. Every time the doctor decieves them into believing that they are being treated, they may as well be injecting them with the disease.

[Mormondude]

The study was a longitudinal observational study of 400 affected men. The first 15 years of the study there was not a 100% cure available. Some of the participants were given the standard treatment available at the time, which was a toxic combination of arsenic, bismuth, and iodide that could be painful or lead to death.

[sewerbob]

Heres some more for ya...

[legalclubs]

There have been some fairly horrific things done in the name of medicine and medical studies. There were also studies where doctors injected babies with radioactive material without obtain parental consent or even informing the parents of what they were doing. These experiments were focused on poor individuals, some of who were black, but some were also white. The point is, there have also been experiments where the medical community found it perfectly acceptable to due the first harm, the actual injection of harmful material into someones body.

[RayEvansHarrell]

I can't speak for the Tuskegee "experiment" but I can speak for the secret, forced sterilization of a large number of Indian men and women by the Indian Health Service prior to 1978. Just google it and read for yourself.

Of course there are the typical "never happeneds" ala the Turks and all of the other genocides but thankfully there is now a first rate book on the subject of world genocide, including the U.S., by Professor Ben Kiernan of Yale titled "Blood and Soil."

For those of you in love with print validation I would encourage everyone to try to find the notorious front page of the Tulsa Tribune that encouraged Whites to kill Blacks in Tulsa on May 31, 1921. Because you can't find it doesn't mean it didn't happen. That front page has now disappeared as has the specific evidence of cannibalism around the globe as noted in William Arens book the "Man-eating Myth." The recent crucifixion of Ward Churchill over whether the government supplied small-pox blankets to Indians is another example of a "Trusel" but not a "Truth." Like Dan Rather and Bush's National Guard Service, Ward Churchill's plight becomes more about the person proving it in print than whether the event actually happened.

So, given the history of U.S. medical experiments in hospitals with "White Soldiers" are you saying that it is unlikely they would have done it with "Blacks" who were considered less socially valuable? Again I would suggest a read in Robert S. Desowitz's book "Who gave Pinta to the Santa Maria" for a little clarity on these issues. You seem to be suggesting that Tuskegee is an abberation in American health practices and that a little paranoia around such bugs as AIDS is pathological. I would argue that rather than being pathological that, like the drugs for the Contras on the streets of LA, it is not pathological but prudent if your skin is dark. There is so much print material out there including by historians like William H. McNeill ("Plagues and People") that to deny the right of sensitivity to a group like African Americans or Native Americans constitutes to my mind as a form of cultural abuse. REH

[Gem4Obama]

In terms of documentation, lets not forget a book called "100 Years of Lynchings" by Ralph Ginzburg

[Nommo]

North Carolina was famous for involuntary, uniformed mass sterilizations of mostly Black women.

[adept2u]

It is a fact that the Tuskegee experiment did not involve the actual infection of the original participants, but that does not take away from the impact of what the government was doing to its' own citizens. This was medical experimentation as awful as those committed by Joeseph Mengele. The government of the United States allowed and promoted the spread of an infectious disease among a group of its' people. It then allowed that disease to fester and spread even after ready cures were available. This experiment continued untill all the known participants were dead in 1972. Thats right "known" participants, because there was never any follow up study to assess who these men had sex with and what vectors of Syphillis was launched in the black community. There was never any attempt to treat those so touched. So, if certain people have a misconception about the actual beginning of the experiment. I think in its conduct there is plenty to bolster their original contentions.

[mbh78213]

To those who claim that Mr. Mills is parsing words -- it IS important to state what really happened. Not only is it unnecessary to embellish when the truth is bad enough. Also, a claim that states the exact facts is more than convincing than a "they might as well have" accusation. "The government injected Black people with syphilis" sounds like, and can be dismissed as, a conspiracy theory. "The government used syphilis patients as guinea pigs" is the truth and can be proven.

[Psalm30]

Thank God!

After the small pox infested blankets distributed to Native Americans, after the decimation of entire indigenous populations by diseases brought to this continent by European colonizers, after facts of the actual 'Tuskegee Experiment' were made known, THANK GOD THERE IS SOMETHING THIS GOVERNMENT IS NOT PROVED TO HAVE ACTUALLY DONE TO HARM BLACK, BROWN, RED, OR YELLOW PEOPLE.

I am ready to blow a gasket here. It is easy to see why so many find it so plausible to spread this urban legend about the Tuskegee Experiment. It is completely in character for the US government to do something that heinous. Completely.

But, you are right. With so many areas of guilt to choose from, why bother to make anything up. Especially since the African-American and Latino communities of this nation are still trying to rebuild in the aftermath of the CIA sponsored crack cocaine epidemic that decimated families and neighborhoods in the 1980s and 1990s.

Next you'll be trying to tell us that black people should be grateful for all the injustices the government many have died on the battlefield to protect has perpetrated against them. Oh wait! Pat Buchanan already said that!

[UndercoverBlackMan]

Well... we can't choose our history, like we can't choose our family. But I am, like Barack Obama, grateful to be an American.

That's a message always missed by those who would rather simmer in resentment and grievance.

[thinkb4uleap]

I don't mean to pick on you personally, but there is something that grates me when I hear people make statements like "I'm grateful to be an American". By the same logic, the wealthy person can rightfully say "I'm grateful to be rich", or one privileged because of their ethnicity - "I'm grateful to be ...". Maybe it's just me, but it sounds a bit arrogant, exclusive and condescending to others who are "different" from whatever we are grateful to be.

[SaltySaltillo]

This blog really is an exercise in bad faith. Let us see... there were 200 placebo healthy black men in the experiment who were told they had "bad blood"... none of the 300+ who did have syphilis were told the truth about their infection - instead they were told they had "bad blood" and were going to receive free medical treatment... even after a cure for syphilis was discovered, this cure was intentionally witheld from the participants in the study even though without the cure, syphilis is likely fatal... Isn't the intentional and misleading witholding of diagnosis and treatment from patients the equivalent of "infecting" them? Cut out the semantic gymnastics... the decision by the government to hide the diagnosis from the patients and intentionally withold the cure for decades was a conscious effort to maintain the patients in an infected state.

[bknott]

HuffPost's Pick

The point of the article is to state the actual facts. The only "semantic gymnastics" I can see is your stipulation that withholding treatments equals infecting someone. What the government actually did is horrible enough. Exaggerating the events only serves to plant doubt about what actually happened.

[suigeneris]

That may be so, but the article would do well to acknowledge that it's splitting hairs to base its entire point on the difference between giving someone a disease and refusing to take it away from them, allowing them to continue suffering from it.

If I have the ability to take away your suffering and I do not, am I not giving you additional suffering? Likewise, every moment the gov't lied to the test subjects and refused to treat their syphilis was a moment the gov't was responsible for that disease.

Parsing it to death to pick nits isn't really the point of the horror of what happened, is it?

[RayEvansHarrell]

No, that is not the point even though you were "selected" by Huffpo. The point is whether Obama's minister was pathological or paranoid. Given the history of the country with more than one group of people of color, I would argue that his, Obama's minister, is closer to expressing history than McCain's whose people claim that to subvert the "Rapture" through the peace process in the Middle East is an action of the "Anti-Christ" of their imaginations.

So you may be right on a "mini" scale technicality but the overall truth of the matter is far from what you argue. I'm a Hillary supporter and a "White" Indian and find it strange to defend the man I am not for as President. Having light skin means that I can pass and listen to everyone.

I would suggest that a little empathy and personal research would save a lot of embarrassment by the "greatest free nation the world has ever known." Please note quotes. I could never make that statement seriously unless I was perceptually pathological. History is just history, but to lie about it does not so much prop a cancer up as to let a healthy society down. REH

[Choc1972]

I can't believe that none of those well-educated black gentlemen has read the highly praised book "Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment." Or seen the HBO movie "Miss Evers' Boys."I recommend they do so before popping off again in public about the Tuskegee experiment. Same goes for Jeremiah Wright.

[SaltySaltillo]

bknott, you are wrong. Even in 1932, under the common law, doctors had a duty of care toward their patients, the violation of which was a tort. Infecting the patient, or denying the patient a diagnosis and treatment, are both tortious violations of the duty of care. The law does not distinguish between these acts. Nor should you.

[Vixen0932]

yes...this is spot on, saltysaltillo