Two mistakes about the facts are more common. First, it was, and is often assumed, that the men were given syphilis by the government. This assumption that the men were injected is often accompanied by a 1950s photograph of a blood draw showing a white doctor’s hand on a black man’s arm, even if close examination shows the physician’s finger is drawing the blood into the syringe. Secondly, many people confuse the subjects of the Study with the famed World War II Tuskegee Airmen, even though their group wasn’t formed until 1941, nine years after the Study was started, and dismantled in 1949, twenty-three years before the Study was ended. (This story wasn’t helped in the 1990s when actor Laurence Fishburne starred in HBO films about both the Study and the Airmen). And alas, knowledge about the complex history of Tuskegee as both a place and an African American educational institution in American history is lacking.
As a historian of the Study, I have tried in various ways over the decades to correct these errors and others. It matters not just for accuracy but especially because what really happened was also the denial of care. The unwitting participants thought they were helping their families by accepting free medical care when there was little to none available. The lack of care, as thousands of studies on health disparities have shown, is of course more normative.
The real facts then force us to think not just about medical ethics in research, but also about the horror of our racist and broken health care system. But the crazed scientists injecting the hapless of course makes for better copy and political fodder. Just ask Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene who went after the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases former head Dr. Anthony Fauci by referring to “the poor men who were injected with syphilis…” among her other tall tales of medical transgressions when questioning Fauci. Yet even liberal Congressman Kweisi Mfume said the men were given syphilis at the same hearing.
It isn’t just crazed or ill-informed Congressional representatives who make this and other factual errors. The media industry is also often occupied with misinformation. I have tried over and over to fix this in various situations: by calling a national news television station to correct NBC’s famed broadcaster Tom Brokaw or answering respectfully when a former Tuskegee Airman called into a Chicago Black radio station program I was on to tell me he was infected by the government.