T. Owens Union

2020 brought two intertwined historical and cultural events:  the devastating coronavirus pandemic and a searing, worldwide civil rights movement.  

In honor of the ‘Negro male’ in Macon County, Alabama (1932 – 1972), who was a part of the ‘Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro male’. The study was conducted without informed consent and the men did not receive appropriate treatment for syphilis even once penicillin was determined to be the treatment of choice in the mid-1940s.

Medical historian Susan Lederer noted that “The Public Health Service investigators who staffed the study over four decades regarded their African American subjects neither as patients, nor as experimental subjects, but as cadavers, who had been identified while still alive”.

Lederer, Susan. The Tuskegee Syphilis study in the Context of American Medical Research, page 266. In Tuskegee Truths: Rethinking the Tuskegee Syphilis Study Studies in Social Medicine. S.M. Reverby ed., Chapel Hill University of North Carolina Press 2000 Reminders of the past.