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.
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So it's less reprehensible to lie to the infected and let them go untreated, watching them fester, suffer and die, watching as they infected others, watching those others fester, suffer and die... all while taking notes... than to have injected them? Okay. So on the Joseph Mengele scale of poor medical practice the allowing-t
dendera,
work it, work it....two snaps up!
And then go here to learn more about Rev. Wright and his church
http://tru
God Bless
Not only that but in 2004 it was uncovered that there was an experiment going on in New York! African American orphans who were HIV positive were being given highly toxic experimental medications without their caregivers consent. Read about it HERE...
http://new
"Jacklyn Hoerger's job was to treat children with HIV at a New York children's home.
But nobody had told her that the drugs she was administering were experimental and highly toxic.
"We were told that if they were vomiting, if they lost their ability to walk, if they were having diarrhoea, if they were dying, then all of this was because of their HIV infection.
Incarnation Children's Center, Harlem
Jacklyn Hoerger worked at the Incarnation Children's Center
In fact it was the drugs that were making the children ill and the children had been enrolled on the secret trials without their relatives' or guardians' knowledge. "
Somebody need only read the book by Sandra Harding entitled a Racial Economy of Science by Sandra Harding (from the University of Delaware) published by the University of Indiana Press to get an overview of some of the experiments and horrors done
David,
What you say concerning the Tuskegee experiment is true. However, if one withholds treatment that could have cured a disease, then they put a whole community at risk. If those men engaged in sexual activity with others during that time, and it is hard to imagine that they didn't, then the U.S.govern
Roland Martin has apparently, since his original statement, done some research. Kudos to him.
He's also been one of the few journalists who've tried to put the Rev. Wright's more inflammatory statements into context.
SO they didn't inject them with it, but refused to treat them..and they were soldiers, correct?..
what a difference
No, they were not soldiers. You're thinking of the "Tuskegee Airmen"... who have nothing to do with the syphilis study. (Despite what several on this board have written.)
Wow, that difference really does nothing for me. It's still an atrocity of epic proportions. What was the point of this article?
Yeah, and CIA agents weren't selling cocaine in black neighborhoods around the country back in the 1980's either. People who made these claims while it was happening were ridiculed as being bat-crap crazy until it was later found that the Reagan administration WAS allowing cocaine to be sold by CIA agents to fund their illegal activities in Central America. Never underestimate our government's (or any governments') capacity to inflict harm on the lower classes to benefit the rich and powerful.
somebody google Michael Ruppert, a white man in law enforcement - not a crazy guy in a tinfoil hat and trash bags over his car windows - who himself was approached to do this very thing.
i was living in Los Angeles at the time he went public with this information, and it was covered on the local news, and there were even investigations, IA and FBI.....
by the way Mr. Mills, perhaps you could tell me: what was Emmett Till's ACTUAL cause of death?
when those white men who kidnapped Emmett Till from his uncle's home in the middle of the night bludgeoned him, castrated him, and tied that cotton gin fan around his neck, did they kill him or did the river they threw him in commit the actual murder? pray tell.
Even if you are correct - and I don't concede that you are - you are missing the entire point. The fact that the federal government would intentionally withhold treatment of a fatal disease so that it could record information on the effects - basically using human beings as lab rats - is so odious and awful and inhumane that that it defies description. The fact that you believe that parsing this unbelievably tragic episode to be some sort of substantive point is chilling. The Tuskeegee "experiment" was an abomination for which everyone should resolve that it never happen again. More to the point, it is a historical reality that provides a rational basis for many Americans- and especially Black Americans - to mistrust governmental administration of health care.
The fact is this study started in 1932 and continued for 40 years. Participants in the study were misled for the entire 40 years.
You are correct that the government did not inject these men with syphilis. Yes, they were already infected. However,penicillin became available in 1947. Penicillin is a cure for syphilis. This cure was withheld from the participan
I believe the distinction between injecting and withholding a cure is a minor one. I can certainly understand based on this history why Rev Wright and members of the black community would be suspicious of the government.
And the difference is what?
Accuracy is a good thing.
Wiki says: "By the end of the study, only 74 of the test subjects were still alive. Twenty-eight of the men had died directly of syphilis, 100 were dead of related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children had been born with congenital syphilis."
I'm sure there were numerous other people who contracted syphilis from the unknowing carriers.
So while those conducting the study technically didn't inject people with syphilis themselves they did allow the subjects of their experiments to unknowingly give it to others.
Getting it straight doesn't make it much better.
"But the government did not infect black men with syphilis." Well, that's ok then. Only women and children were deliberately infected:
"By the end of the experiment, 28 of the men had died directly of syphilis, 100 were dead of related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children had been born with congenital syphilis."
http://www
David what you say may or may not be true, but the fact is AA believe that the government caused great harm to them. This is a passage from "The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment" from the Tuskegee Institute:
The Legacy of Tuskegee
In 1990, a survey found that 10 percent of African Americans believed that the U.S. government created AIDS as a plot to exterminate blacks, and another 20 percent could not rule out the possibility that this might be true. As preposterous and paranoid as this may sound, at one time the Tuskegee experiment must have seemed equally farfetched.
Who could imagine the government, all the way up to the Surgeon General of the United States, deliberately allowing a group of its citizens to die from a terrible disease for the sake of an ill-conceived experiment? In light of this and many other shameful episodes in our history, African Americans' widespread mistrust of the government and white society in general should not be a surprise to anyone.
http://www
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