NY group paid poor widows of Tuskegee experiment victims $100 in exchange for autopsy consent to study ‘bad blood’
Despite her leadership of the descendants group, Head said she didn’t even know about Milbank’s role in the study until Koller called her one day last fall. The payments have been discussed in academic studies and a couple books, but the descendants were unaware, she said.
“It really was something that caught me off guard,” she said. Head’s father left the study after becoming suspicious of the research, years before it ended, and didn’t receive any of the Milbank money, she said, but hundreds of others did.
Other prominent organizations, universities including Harvard and Georgetown and the state of California have acknowledged their ties to racism and slavery. Historian Susan M. Reverby, who wrote a book about the study, researched the Milbank Fund’s participation at the fund’s request. She said its apology could be an example for other groups with ties to systemic racism.
’“It’s really important because at a time when the nation is so divided, how we come to terms with our racism is so complicated,” she said. “Confronting it is difficult, and they didn’t have to do this. I think it’s a really good example of history as restorative justice.”
Starting in 1932, government medical workers in rural Alabama withheld treatment from unsuspecting Black men infected with syphilis so doctors could track the disease and dissect their bodies afterward. About 620 men were studied, and roughly 430 of them had syphilis. Reverby’s study said Milbank recorded giving a total of $20,150 for about 234 autopsies.
Revealed by The Associated Press in 1972, the study ended and the men sued, resulting in a $9 million settlement from which descendants are still seeking the remaining funds, described in court records as “relatively small.”
The Milbank Memorial Fund got involved in 1935 after the U.S. surgeon general at the time, Hugh Cumming, sought the money, which was crucial in persuading families to agree to the autopsies, Reverby found. The decision to approve the funding was made by a group of white men with close ties to federal health officials but little understanding of conditions in Alabama or the cultural norms of Black Southerners, to whom dignified burials were very important, Koller said.
“One of the lessons for us is you get bad decisions if … your perspectives are not particularly diverse and you don’t pay attention to conflicts of interest,” Koller said.
The payments became less important as the Depression ended and more Black families could afford burial insurance, Reverby said. Initially named as a defendant, Milbank was dismissed as a target of the men’s lawsuit and the organization put the episode behind it.
Years later, books including Reverby’s “Examining Tuskegee, The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy,” published in 2009, detailed the fund’s involvement. But it wasn’t until after Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police that discussions among the Milbank staff — which is now much more diverse — prompted the fund’s leaders to reexamine its role, Koller said.
“Both staff and board felt like we had to face up to this in a way that we had not before,” he said.
Besides delivering a public apology to a gathering of descendants, the fund decided to donate an undisclosed amount to the Voices of our Fathers Legacy Foundation, Koller said.
The money will make scholarships available to the descendants, Head said. The group also plans a memorial at Tuskegee University, which served as a conduit for the payments and was the location of a hospital where medical workers saw the men.
While times have changed since the burial payments were first approved nearly 100 years ago, Reverby also said there’s no way to justify what happened.
“The records say very clearly, untreated syphilis,” she said. “You don’t need a Ph.D. to figure that out, and they just kept doing it year after year.”
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