After emancipation and with the rise of Jim Crow, Black Americans continued to look to science as an essential tool in their freedom struggle. Even the most widely cited story of Black medical exploitation — the Tuskegee syphilis study — has its roots in the Black community’s faith in science. One reason the federal government conducted the study on Alabama’s Black population, beginning in 1932, was because Black health-care advocates had been trying to treat that population for years.
In 1915, Black community leaders created Negro Health Week to draw attention to the lack of health care received by Black Americans, especially in the rural South. By 1928, Booker T. Washington received financial support from Julius Rosenwald, a White philanthropist, to treat and study syphilis in the rural South’s Black population. But when the stock market crashed the next year, Rosenwald pulled the plug. Three years later, the U.S. Public Health Service took over the program, this time without offering any treatment — and with disastrous results.
If the Tuskegee syphilis study stands as the embodiment of the Black community’s medical exploitation, then Negro Health Week might well represent its opposite: a marker of the Black community’s long-standing advocacy for quality health care — and, by implication, sound medical science.
Even as news of the Tuskegee trials became public in 1972, the Black Panther Party was calling on the scientific community to pay more attention to sickle cell anemia, which disproportionately affects Black people. The Black Panthers were ruthless critics of the medical neglect of Black communities, but they understood keenly how essential sound science and medicine was to Black liberation. In 1970, they mandated that all chapters set up free health clinics in Black communities, in addition to free public health care for Americans of all races.
This history of the Black community’s continuous support of science can help dispel the exaggerated public concerns about Black vaccine hesitancy. Better yet, it might provide some essential context to explain why — despite ongoing issues of medical neglect, scientific exploitation and technological discrimination — Black communities continue to have faith in science. Perhaps it’s because they have no history of losing faith at all.