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Special Treatment

piny

Since rl/robert brought it up in the birth control thread, here’s an article on the Tuskeegee syphilis experiments:

For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis. These men, for the most part illiterate sharecroppers from one of the poorest counties in Alabama, were never told what disease they were suffering from or of its seriousness. Informed that they were being treated for “bad blood,”1 their doctors had no intention of curing them of syphilis at all. The data for the experiment was to be collected from autopsies of the men, and they were thus deliberately left to degenerate under the ravages of tertiary syphilis—which can include tumors, heart disease, paralysis, blindness, insanity, and death. “As I see it,” one of the doctors involved explained, “we have no further interest in these patients until they die.”

Wikipedia has more information.

And here’s the entry on the Tuskeegee airmen.

Prior to the Tuskegee Airmen all combat pilots had been white. However a series of legislative moves by the United States Congress in 1941 forced the Air Corps to form an all-black combat unit, much to the War Department’s chagrin. In response they set up a system to accept only those with a level of flight experience or higher education that they expected to be hard to fill, a half-hearted effort to eliminate the unit before it could begin. This policy backfired, and soon the Air Corps was receiving applications from men who clearly met the grade.

They were apparently named for the Tuskeegee Institute, where they were formed. This might have had something to do with the Air Corps’ literacy test.

6 thoughts on Special Treatment

  1. rl/robert could have used google to find all this stuff himself, too.

    The movie “Tuskeegee Airmen” wasn’t bad either.

  2. I, uh, did. Read the thread. (Sorry, defensive mode today.)

    And wow…i didn’t realize i had this kind of power.

  3. It seems likely it was a holdover from the regard BT Washington, founder of Tuskegee, had among white politicians, especially Southerners with their hands on Congressional purse strings
    I am well aware there were other, perhaps more scholarly black institutions like Howard, Atlanta, etc. It thus seems to me possible it was political clout.

  4. It seems likely it was a holdover from the regard BT Washington, founder of Tuskegee, had among white politicians, especially Southerners with their hands on Congressional purse strings
    I am well aware there were other, perhaps more scholarly black institutions like Howard, Atlanta, etc. It thus seems to me possible it was political clout.

    Thanks for the clarification.

  5. Sorry rl/robert. I didn’t pay much attention in the original thread (to the comments anyway. I find that if I get to them late, I get lost in the conversations in comments so more often then not I skip them entirely) and I sometimes get very close to the end of my rope so can be heard screaming, “Look it up!” on occassion. It comes as a result of being asked, “What does that mean?” or something similar.

  6. It’s all good. I understand the urge to scream that, especially in a place like this where willful ignorance seems to pop up all too often.

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