When gathering materials for my articles, I tend to focus on the injustices that have been done to Africans and African-Americans. As an African-American myself, I think that all African-Americans should have a complete understanding of the injustices done to us by having knowledge of our history before, during, and after slavery.

The famed Tuskegee Experiment was a study of untreated syphilis and one of the most horrible scandals in American medicine during the 20th Century. For a period of 40 years, from 1932 to 1972, doctors and public officials watched between 400 to 600 Black men in Alabama die in a scientific experiment based on unethical methods that produced no new information about syphilis.

The individuals involved in the study were never told that they were participating in an “experiment.” Treatment that could have cured them was deliberately withheld and many of the men were prevented from seeing physicians who could have helped them. As a result, scores of people died painful deaths, became permanently blind or went insane, and the children of several participants were born with congenital syphilis.

After the injustice of slavery, they did not know what to do with us. White people’s demonic ways lead them to do these evil experiments on us to keep us enslaved and dependent on them for necessary treatment. One Southern medical journal even proposed castration instead of lynching as retribution for black sexual crimes.

Fannie Louis Hamer was also a victim of the injustices done to us during slavery. While on the plantation, Hamer had developed a knot on her stomach. When she went to see the physician, he removed her uterus, as well as the knot, which prevented her from ever having children.

Hamer was only one of many African-American women who were sterilized, a practice which became a favorite of white doctors. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, trafficked in stereotypes and used the Nero Project to decrease black fertility.

Blog by TruthandJusticeforAll