The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment on Black Men: Attorney and Feds in Dispute
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The
Tuskegee Syphilis
Experiment on Black Men:
Attorney and
Feds in
Dispute Over Remaining Settlement Money
The government and a lawyer who represented Black men who were unwitting participants in an
infamous syphilis study are haggling over what
to do with money left over from a $9 million legal settlement. While the
government contends it should recoup the $170,000 that remains from the
agreement, attorney Fred Gray says the money should go for a memorial
to be located at an east Alabama center that employs his daughter. A
federal judge in Montgomery is considering how to settle the dispute.
For 40 years ending in 1972, the government used poor blacks in
Tuskegee to see what would happen to men when syphilis was left
untreated. Gray filed suit and in 1973 got an agreement to provide free
medical care and $9 million in payments to the victims and their
families. The settlement said that if any money was remaining after all
survivors and heirs were paid, it would revert to the U.S. Treasury.
About $170,000 is left. Gray has asked a court to give the money to the
Tuskegee Human and Civil Rights Multicultural Center as a memorial to
his clients. Gray is president of the center's board and his daughter,
Deborah Gray, is executive director, earning $35,000 annually. [more 
]
- For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the U.S.
Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 black men in
the late stages of syphilis. These men, for the most part illiterate
sharecroppers from one of the poorest counties in Alabama, were never
told what disease they were suffering from or of its seriousness.
Informed that they were being treated for "bad blood,"1 their doctors
had no intention of curing them of syphilis at all. The data for the
experiment was to be collected from autopsies of the men, and they were
thus deliberately left to degenerate under the ravages of tertiary
syphilis--which can include tumors, heart disease, paralysis, blindness,
insanity, and death. "As I see it," one of the doctors involved
explained, "we have no further interest in these patients until they
die." [more ] and [more ] and [more ]
- On May 15, 1997 President Clinton apologized for
the experiments. He stated, "the United States Government did something
that was wrong, deeply, profoundly, morally wrong. It was an outrage to
our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens. We can
end the silence. We can stop turning our heads away. We can look at you
in the eye and finally say on behalf of the American people what the
United States Government did was shameful, and I am sorry. [more ]
