The Tuskegee Syphilis Study ran between the years 1932-1972: a total of forty years. African American males were highly encouraged to participate in the study as they were told that they had ‘bad blood’ and would receive aspirin as medication. These men were not aware that they had contracted syphilis, and would continue to engage in sexual activity with their wives or other women if not married. As a result, these women contracted syphilis, as did some babies born from such mothers. These men were also encouraged to allow their bodies to undergo an autopsy when they passed.
In return, the Public Health Services (PHS) would pay for these men’s burial costs. These selected men agreed to this as burial costs were often very expensive, yet never signed a consent form. In 1943 it became known that penicillin could treat and cure syphilis during its early stages.’ Those leading the study did not treat their patients but continued examining the progression of syphilis. When the study ended in 1972 due to a whistleblower, the study took on a different life. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study remains prominent in the American culture today, forty years after the study was uncovered. The American public and popular culture would go on to utilize Tuskegee in plays, movies, television shows, and music, continually alternating the story of Tuskegee.
In 1972, Peter Buxtun spoke to a reporter, Edith Lederer, about the happenings in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, leaking the news about this unreported story. Tuskegee and its history with the PHS were about to enter into every American household. On July 26th, Lederer published the article through the AP wire and captivated the attention of Americans with this sentence: “For 40 years the United States Public Health Service has conducted a study in which human beings with syphilis, who were induced to serve as guinea pigs, have gone without medical treatment for the disease and a few have died of its late effect, even though an effective therapy was eventually discovered”.”
The very next year, hearings began in the U.S. Senate regarding human experimentation and new guidelines were created to protect individuals. Over the next two years, 1974-1975, the men subjected to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study were offered free healthcare for life and received compensation. In 1975, the wives, widows, and children of the men in the study were provided with the same healthcare coverage if they had contracted syphilis too.
With this information regarding the Tuskegee Syphilis Study entering into the lives of Americans, individuals within popular culture began to bring the experiment into the mainstream media. In 1992 a jazz clarinetist, Don Byron, released an album titled Tuskegee Experiments in which he criticizes those that played a role in allowing the Tuskegee Syphilis Study to occur in the first place, such as Eunice Rivers. Eunice Rivers was an African American female nurse who interacted with the men that participated in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Bryon’s jazz approach to the study allowed for a broader audience to absorb the history. It also made the story a contemporary issue by not allowing it to fade from the memory of Americans. That same year ABC released a special on the happenings of the study. In ABC’s segment on the Tuskegee Syphilis Study they interviewed both those subjected to the study and the doctors that conducted.
