An anniversary of national atonement
Twenty years ago today, May 16, 1997, President Bill Clinton formally and publicly apologized on behalf of the nation to five old men from Alabama.
Those five were just the ones on hand for the ceremony. The apology was meant to encompass hundreds more — along with their spouses, their children, even grandchildren — who had been victims of an officially sanctioned atrocity and conspiracy for four decades.
That atrocity, of course, was the notorious Tuskegee “experiment” — officially named, with chilling scientific-bureaucratic-Orwellian detachment, the U.S. Public Health Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.
It had nothing to do with health, and it went untreated by design. These men, told they were getting free health care, were instead studied over the years for the ravages of the disease — even after penicillin was found to be a cure (but not for them).
The “experiment” began in 1932, in the depths of the Depression, when about 400 African-American men in nearby Macon County were promised free medical care, then studied over the years as the disease ran its ugly course.
By 1972, Associated Press reported, 28 of the men had died of syphilis, 100 others had died of what were believed to have been syphilis-related conditions and complications, 40 or more wives or other women had been infected, and 19 children had been born with the disease.
"We were treated unfairly, to some extent like guinea pigs,” 94-year-old Fred Shaw said at the 1997 ceremony. “We were all hard-working men, and not boys, and citizens of the United States."
According to the AP background story published at the time of the White House ceremony, the National Medical Association, an organization of African-American physicians, had sought the formal acknowledgment. The NMA noted that mistrust among black Americans for the medical establishment was so great since the Tuskegee revelations that many avoided clinical trials even for diseases that disproportionately affect them.
"The American people are sorry for the loss, for the years of hurt,” the president said that day 20 years ago. “You did nothing wrong, but you were grievously wronged. I apologize and I am sorry that this apology has been so long in coming."
A presidential apology even for so hideous a wrong as this did not escape the predictable contempt of those who can always be counted on to brand any official acknowledgment of even the most appalling historic wrong as disloyalty. Happily, those voices were few and, for the most part, rightly ignored.
This anniversary is worth noting if only for somber reflection on a prolonged and terrifyingly calculated injustice committed in the name of science, in the name of medicine, in the name of the United States, against hundreds of its own citizens. It wasn’t the first, and probably won’t be the last. But it’s surely among the most morally inconceivable — and yet, it happened.
What we must render inconceivable is the possibility that such a thing could ever happen again.
This story was originally published May 15, 2017 at 5:54 PM with the headline "An anniversary of national atonement."