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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Blacks Will Get Apology For Lab Tests Tuskegee Experiment Left 400 Men Untreated For Syphilis

Washington Post

A quarter century after the end of the infamous Tuskegee experiment, the United States plans to formally apologize to the few remaining survivors and relatives of nearly 400 impoverished African American men who were left untreated for syphilis as part of a government study.

The White House said Tuesday that President Clinton intends to host a public ceremony soon to officially admit the nation’s wrongdoing in an episode that has become a metaphor in the black community for suspicion and mistrust of government.

“The president thinks it’s a blight on the American record and would like to make certain that’s corrected,” said deputy White House press secretary Mary Ellen Glynn.

“We consider it a moral obligation to apologize on behalf of the government.”

Clinton’s decision is intended to bring symbolic closure to one of the most emotionally charged events in U.S. history at a time when race relations still often seem precariously on edge.

More than two decades ago, the federal government paid out $10 million in financial compensation to victims and their heirs, but the country’s leaders have never apologized for a project that essentially reduced black men into unwitting laboratory animals for researchers studying the effects of venereal disease.

“Any kind of apology that would emanate from the highest level of government would have symbolic importance,” said Arnold H. Taylor, a history professor at Howard University.

“What the Tuskegee experiment did was validate the fact that the (American) system of racial apartheid was so pervasive that it lent itself to abuses against black people.”

For four decades starting in 1932, the government lured mostly uneducated black men to participate in its experiment at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama with promises of free lunches, free transportation and free medicine. The study followed the progress of syphilis in 399 men who were told they were being treated, but given placebos instead. Even after penicillin emerged as a successful cure for the disease in the mid-1940s, the government continued the study until the experiment was publicly exposed in 1972.

Only eight participants survive today, ranging in age from 87 to 109, along with 23 wives of victims, 15 children and two grandchildren.