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

[PennP]

The truth is almost as damning. From the Tuskegee Institute itself:

"Over the course of the project, PHS officials not only denied study participants treatment, but prevented other agencies from supplying treatment.

"During World War II, about 50 of the study subjects were ordered by their draft boards to undergo treatment for syphilis. The PHS requested that the draft boards exclude study subjects from the requirement for treatment. The draft boards agreed.

"In 1943, the PHS began to administer penicillin to patients with syphilis. Study subjects were excluded.

"Beginning in 1952, the PHS began utilizing local health departments to track study participants who had left Macon County. Until the end of the study in the 1970s, local health departments worked with the PHS to keep the study subjects from receiving treatment."


Compared to the deliberate infection with VD, is it any more excusable to fail to inform these men that they had this disease, AND fail to treat it, AND prevent the subjects from receiving treatment they'd otherwise have gotten via the public health service? Stating that they were deliberately infected by the government is technically false. Stating that they were deliberately kept sick, and possibly infectious to others, without their knowledge or consent--that appears to be true.

Among the consequences:
"The suspicion and fear generated by the Tuskegee Syphilis Study are evident today. Community workers report mistrust of public health institutions within the African American community. Alpha Thomas of the Dallas Urban League testified before the National Commission on AIDS: "So many African American people I work with do not trust hospitals or any of the other community health care service providers because of that Tuskegee Experiment" (National Commission on AIDS, 1990)."
http://www.tuskegee.edu/Global/Story.asp?s=1207598

[hquain]

Night and Day!

The victims weren't injected, merely collected. And there was an apology a few decades later, and sincere regrets all around! Everyone should feel very comfortable with the perpetrators' intentions, policies, and PR skills, most especially "educated black men on national television."

[dollphingurl]

you're thick.

[Gogetter]

Wow!! This makes it so much more of a benign "experiment", and a whole lot less racist. These "doctors" didn't inject black men with syphilis; they just sat idly by and watch them suffer and deteriorate from the disease, and watched as the men's wives and children became infected because the men weren't treated. By the way, this went on for forty years. It is a common misconception that the men were purposely infected with syphilis. Thanks for clearing that up. Of course, the researchers did allow the men to unknowingly infect their wives and girlfriends, and watched as the disease was passed on to these men's children. Less immoral?
I'm done "popping off".

[AntonBursch]

Show some respect. Your blog is 2 steps from Pat Buchanan's own "blacks are lucky they were brought here as slaves" blog. You wouldn't talk like this if it was a Jew misstating the horrors of the holocaust.

[bridgietherease]

So...while the government did not actually do the injecting. "Instead doctors treated these men like laboratory animals, studying the course of the disease over decades."

The doctors treated the black men like laboratory animals.

The doctors treated the black men like laboratory animals.

Ok, one more time because, these words, they do not mean what you think they mean.

The doctors treated the black men like laboratory animals.

Are you honestly arguing that since the government didn't do the injecting, instead just the monitoring of things like dementia and tumors for decades w/out ever treating the symptoms, that the government is excused?

Huffington Post, why would you publish something so petty and stupid? Author, dude, citing a minor factual error doesn't make you a journalist. You want a cookie, or a medal, for this trash?

It's funny. You said you didn't want to dishonor the truth. I think that's exactly what you did.

[KimberlyKay]

The list of misconceptions currently extant in our society are numerous and I probably think some of them are the absolute truth. What happened at Tuskegee was horrible, atrocious and almost psychopathic. The fact that it is slightly twisted at times no more lowers the level of atrocity committed there than the fact that one might get the actual number wrong of those killed in Pol Pot's Cambodia. I don't believe anyone would have been humiliated by the correction you point out above.

If you want to really address a current misconception, how about going after the belief that the economy always does better in war time regardless of how, where or in what way we are pumping tax payer money into that war effort. This misconception is much more damaging to our current position than the minor degrees of atrocity at Tuskegee. Since we are spending most of the money in Iraq, it is not being pumped into our economy and is instead being taken out of our economy.

[dollphingurl]

"minor degrees of atrocity" - four generations of Americans, hunny. forty years.

nothing minor about that.

just because Iraq is a LARGER scale doesn't make the Tuskegee horror minor by comparison.

they shouldn't even be compared.

and you're talking about money, and the economy in the comparison.

dude, are you a Hillary supporter? it kinda shows.

[Erdgeist]

The bulk of Republicans remind me of Sergeant Schultz, who was the bumbling Nazi sergeant in the television series, Hogan's Heros. When confronted with the atrocities to which African Americans were subject (not to mention Native Americans) all the Republicans can say, like Sergeant Schultz, is: “I hear nothing, I see nothing, I know nothing!”