U.S. Did NOT ‘Give Blacks Syphilis’ With Tuskegee Experiment

Posted on March 26, 2008

A blogger at the Huffington Post had a great post a few days ago. It concerned this myth that the U.S. government gave black men Syphilis during the infamous Tuskegee experiment in the 1930s. The truth is that the government did not give anyone Syphilis. The government did unethically, even criminally, withhold treatment to chronicle the ravages of the disease on black men that already had the disease, but it did not give the men the disease. The black men’s own actions led to that consequence.

David Mills of the Huffington Post reminds us of the facts of the case.

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.

So, what was the deal then?

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.

Yet, as Mills reports, so many pundits repeated the Wright lie as to show that few of them have a clue what they are talking about. Along with the Racist Rev. Wright, Mills gives us a litany of the latest unschooled commentators repeating the lie.

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.”

The real history of the Tuskegee experiment is bad enough without making it worse by adding lies to the tale. Mills is right to call them to the carpet.

I am shocked that there is a good post to be seen on the HuffPost site, but Mills got in a really good one here. He easily reveals the uninformed nature of too many pundits on this issue.

Good on ya David Mills.

» Filed Under History, Liberal Media/Bias, News