“No one can blame us for the distrust of a government that has betrayed us over and over again,” she said.
There’s the Tuskegee experiment that went on from the 1930s into the 1970s. Hundreds of Black men, under the direction of the federal government, were injected with Syphilis.
“And although there was penicillin that came along as a cure, they still allowed these Black men to go untreated with all these horrible painful symptoms and died,” said Tyehimba.
There’s also what happened to Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman who entered Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s for vaginal bleeding.