Fifty years ago, 400 Black sharecroppers in Tuskegee, Alabama were subject to a study that let 128 participants die at the hands of “science.” To put it bluntly, officials and trusted practitioners used Black men as guinea pigs in an experiment that would eventually be outed as one of the most racist, unethical practices in history.
In 1932, the CDC (then called the U.S. Public Health Service) launched the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Malem” which involved 600 Black men in total – 399 who had been diagnosed with syphilis and 201 who did not have the sexually transmitted illness. Officials never collected consent from participants, and many were told they were being treated for “bad blood,” rural terminology that covers various ailments.
