Tuskegee's Truths by Susan M. Reverby

Author:Susan M. Reverby [Reverby, Susan M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0807825395
Publisher: UNC Press
Published: 2015-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Your Silence Will Not Protect You

Nurse Rivers and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study1

Evelynn M. Hammonds

I’ve been afraid to know more about this story. I sat in the library over an hour killing time—flipping through magazines, talking with a friend, making several trips to the water fountain. I stared at her picture on the poster from the Schlesinger Library’s Black Women’s Oral History Project.

Her face has always looked so familiar to me. The reddish-brown skin and the gray hair brushed back from her forehead in the style worn by many of the women from the central part of Georgia where she and my family were reared. Her hands were large and looked as if they were used to hard work. She had a shy smile on her face. When I could not postpone it any longer, I sat down to read the words of Eunice Rivers, the black woman who had been a major character in an ugly episode in American history, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.

In July 1972, the world first learned that for forty years the United States Public Health Service had been conducting a study of untreated syphilis on almost four hundred black men in Macon County, Alabama. From 1932 to 1972, 399 men who had syphilis and another 201 who were free of the disease serving as controls, were a part of what became known as the Tuskegee Study. While whites reacted with shock at the exposure of such scientific abuse in their own country (which was for many of them comparable to the crimes of the Nazis against Jews during World War II), African Americans almost universally saw the study as just one of the more blatant acts of genocide long perpetrated against our communities by whites.

As the indifference of the medical and public health establishments has allowed the slow, steady increase of AIDS in African-American communities to continue unabated, many black people have likened the tragic AIDS epidemic to the Tuskegee Study. In the case of AIDS, many African Americans feel that we have little reason to trust public health experts, still largely white, who were part of an agency that used a group of poor black men as their guinea pigs for forty years. But there is another lesson we need to learn from the Tuskegee Study as we enter the second decade of the AIDS epidemic, and that is about our own responsibilities as black women to speak about the ravages of this disease in our communities. The story of the Tuskegee Study and particularly Nurse Eunice Rivers’ role in it, should remind us of the ways in which we can be made complicit in the suffering of our own people.

Evelynn M. Hammonds is associate professor of the History of Science in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Originally published in Evelyn C. White, The Black Women’s Health Book: Speaking for Ourselves (Seattle: Seal Press, 1994): 323–31. Copyright © Evelynn M. Hammonds and reprinted by permission of Seal Press.

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