50 years ago, a news reporter broke the story that shocked a nation -- that the U.S. government had denied hundreds of poor, Black men treatment for syphilis -- in what became known as the 'Tuskegee Study.' alnews tuskegee syphilisstudy alabamanewsn...
50th Anniversary of First News Report on Tuskegee Syphilis Study – Photo from Associated Press
A portrait of former Associated Press investigative reporter Jean Heller, when she was working for the company, is displayed at her home in Southport, N.C., on Saturday, July 9, 2022. In July 1972, Heller broke the story about the U.S. Public Health Service study in which Black men in Alabama went untreated for syphilis so researchers could document the disease's effects.
FILE - In this May 16, 1997, file photo, President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, background, help Herman Shaw, 94, a Tuskegee Syphilis Study victim, during a news conference in Washington. Making amends for a shameful U.S. experiment, Clinton apologized to Black men who went untreated for syphilis so researchers could document the disease's effects.
Inside were documents telling a tale that, even today, staggers the imagination: For four decades, the U.S. government had denied hundreds of poor, Black men treatment for syphilis so researchers could study its ravages on the human body.The U.S. Public Health Service called it “The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” The world would soon come to know it simply as the “Tuskegee Study” — one of the biggest medical scandals in U.S.
“I knew that I could not do this,” Lederer said during a recent interview. “AP, in 1972, was not going to put a young reporter from San Francisco on a plane to Tuskegee, Alabama, to go and do an investigative story.”At the time, Heller was the only woman on the AP’s fledgling Special Assignment Team, a rarity in the industry. Still, she was not spared the casual sexism of the era.
The government stonewalled her and refused to talk about the study. So, Heller began making the rounds elsewhere, starting with colleges, universities and medical schools. “I asked them if they had any kind of documents, books, magazines, whatever … that would fit a, what today we would call a profile or a search engine search, for ‘Tuskegee,’ ‘farmers’, ‘Public Health Service,’ ‘syphilis,’” Heller says.
An AP medical writer helped interview doctors for the story. Within just a few short weeks, the team felt they had enough to publish. Eventually, more than 600 men were enrolled. What they were not told was that about a third would receive no treatment at all — even after penicillin became available in the 1940s.
At 79, Heller is still haunted by her story and the effects it had on the men and women of rural Alabama, and the nation as a whole.
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