Remembering History

FOR Blacks in America, history is an odd sort of thing. After spending 400 years surviving a non-stop onslaught of enslavement, lynching, torture, illegal imprisonment and a host of other crimes whose magnitude and variety are nearly impossible even to catalogue--after all that, the historical record still gets twisted, edited and ignored by far too many people.

February, which is National Black History Month, has once again come to a close without significantly affecting the conscience of a country which for the most part seems to have tucked away the past and present realities of American racism into the recesses of the subconscious. Harvard, of course, is no exception. When reminded too directly or too often of the country's racism, the unspoken but tangible response of students is often an impatient, almost indifferent attitude, as if to say. "Oh yeah--we all know about that." And the issue, along with the truth, gets a hasty reburial.

But there are events of public record which must be publicized if only to jolt people from apathy. It has become almost a cliche to say that the American Dream is a myth that clouds the 400-year nightmare this country has been for Blacks. Those curious about the origins of such an attitude should do a little snooping around the libraries.

This year, for instance, marks the 25th anniversary of an extraordinary injustice. In 1958, a seven-year-old Fuzzy Simpson and nine-year-old Hanover Thompson were on their way home from a segregated school in Monroe, North Carolina. A white six-year-old was returning from her school at the same time, and when she got home she told her mother she had kissed Fuzzy.

The boys were taken to court and tried for the crime of rape. Fuzzy was kept in a wire cage during the trial, at which the two were found guilty. They were imprisoned for two years, until their lawyer, Conrad Lynn, could persuade Eleanor Roosevelt to personally arrange an intervention by President Eisenhower.

A much longer and even more chilling case is that of the so-called Tuskegee Experiment. In 1972, the Associated Press reported that for 40 years the United States Public Health Service (PHS) in Tuskegee, Alabama, had deliberately denied treatment to 399 Black men afflicted with syphilis in order to study the disease's last, lethal stages. James H. Jones, who published a meticulously complete account of the experiment in a book called Bad Blood (Free Press, 1981), notes:

The Tuskegee Study had nothing to do with treatment. No new drugs were tested; neither was any effort made to establish the efficacy of old forms of treatment. It was a non-therapeutic experiment, aimed at compiling data on the effects of the spontaneous evolution of syphilis on Black males.

Starting in 1932, researchers sought out subjects for the test; the overwhelming majority of the men were poor and illiterate. The doctors told them only that they had "bad blood," for which they would be given drugs from time to time. They were given placebos. No one was told he had the disease, or that he was part of an experiment at all (a "control" group of 201 healthy Black men were also duped).

In exchange for cooperation, the subjects got free physical examinations, treatment for minor ailments, rides to and from the PHS clinics, hot meals and a guarantee that $50 would be given to their survivors to pay for a burial. Some joined because this amounted to the closest thing to health care and burial insurance they could expect.

Long after penicillin became generally available as a cure for syphilis in 1953, the men were still denied treatment and allowed slowly to die. If the press had not brought the case to light in 1972, the experiment would have continued. Even after the story broke, federal officials argued for months about whether the government was authorized to give health care to the experiment's survivors; finally, Caper W. Wainbanger '35 who was then Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare) ordered medical treatment.

There wasn't much treatment to do; according to Jones, as many as 100 of them had died of the disease by 1969. In 1974, the government agreed out of court to pay $10 billion to the survivors and heirs of the men in the experiment. As of 1980, about 50 surviving wives and 20 surviving children of men in the experiment were found to have syphilis that was directly attributable to the government's refusal to treat the men.

POSSIBLY the most amazing thing about the study is the manner and speed with which it entered and receded from public knowledge. When the facts were first brought out, congressmen, newspapers and citizens throughout the country all denounced the way racism, deception, and human experimentation had been combined for 40 years to make poor, uneducated people victims of their own government. As one person put it, "If this is true, how in the name of God can we look others in the eye and say: "This is a decent country'."

Virtually the only ones to remain undisturbed by the experiment were the "health" officials themselves. As Jones concludes in Bad Blood:

There was nothing in their public statements to indicate even an ounce of contrition. No apologies were tendered; no one admitted any personal wrongdoing. If anything, they probably felt maligned and abused by the public's reaction and betrayed by the government's failure to defead the study. Had they been given an opportunity to retrace their steps, there is little doubt they would have conducted the experiment again.

Bad Blood should be required reading at Harvard, as should the case of Fuzzy and Hanover from 1958. A good deal of the casual attitude about racism that exists on campus is probably caused in part by ignorance about the past (and the present for that matter).

There are many, many more events, both historical and current, that demand further investigation and publication--the Black soldiers just returning from World War I who were lynched while still wearing their uniforms, the still-unsolved murders of 14 Black women in Boston over the last few years, the shooting of a nine-year-old Black girl by the Ku Klux Klan on the anniversary of Hitler's birthday--the list goes on.

It might be easy to despair of justice for American Blacks anytime soon, especially in light of the way students seem to shrug off "That stuff." The challenge--which should not be confined to Black History Month, although that might be a good place to start--is to preserve at least the truth of American history. Who knows? People might even start working for systemic change.