Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
A case of healing wounds of long ago
Descendants seek to pay tribute to victims of infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study with funds from settlement
TUSKEGEE, Ala. — Decades later, it’s still hard to grasp what the federal government did to hundreds of black men in rural Alabama — even if you’re among their descendants, lighting candles in their memory.
For 40 years starting in 1932, medical workers in the segregated South withheld treatment for unsuspecting men infected with a sexually transmitted disease simply so doctors could track the ravages of the horrid illness and dissect their bodies afterward.
Finally exposed in 1972 , the study ended and the men sued, resulting in a $9 million settlement. Twenty years ago this month, President Bill Clinton apologized for the U.S. government. It seemed to mark the end of this ugly episode, once and for all. Except it didn’t. Relatives of the men still struggle with the stigma of being linked to the experiment, commonly known today as the “Tuskegee Syphilis Study.” For years they have met privately to share their pain and honor the victims.
And, amazingly, that class-action lawsuit filed by the men in 1973 has outlived them all. The litigation continues to this day, with a federal court currently considering a request that will help determine the study’s final legacy.
A key, unanswered question: What should be done with unclaimed settlement money that still sits in court-controlled accounts? Tuskegee syphilis study lives on at the federal courthouse in Montgomery.
Settlement funds were used for decades to compensate study participants and more than 9,000 of their relatives. Court workers were unable to locate other descendants, and some never responded to letters from the clerk’s office, which disbursed millions before the last payment was recorded in 2008.
Court officials will not say how much money is left, but documents indicate the balance is mostly interest earnings from money first paid by the government decades ago. Gray said he’s heard it’s less than $100,000.
Some family members say the money should be used for additional funding for medical screenings for the men’s families, and others want a long-discussed memorial at the old hospital where the study was run at Tuskegee University.
U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson is currently considering a request Gray filed in August to use the remaining money to fund operation of the Tuskegee Human and Civil Rights Multicultural Center, a combination museum and town welcome center that includes a display about the syphilis study.
The center is located in an old bank building owned by the county, and it’s operated by a nonprofit headed by Gray and his daughter; the organization had net assets of more than $850,000 in 2015, with money coming from grants and donations, tax records show. The names of the men who were involved in the program are etched in a circle on the floor as a memorial.
In his address to descendants during the community service, Gray made what amounted to a closing argument for using the money for the museum, which is open only during the summer because of funding shortages. Gray told descendants that the men of the study — the people he represented after that meeting with Charlie Pollard — wanted a lasting memorial to their legacy, and he has worked for 20 years to make it happen at the center.
A judge refused a similar request from Gray to provide the leftover money to the museum in 2004 after the government insisted it should get the money, records show.
But Pollard’s 92-year-old daughter, Ralphine Pollard Harper, said she likes the idea. People need to know what happened, she said, even if her father didn’t like discussing the study.
“He’d get mad about it,” she recalled. “He said, ‘They just took us up here and made guinea pigs of us.’ ”