TUSKEGEE In 1972, then Tuskegee Mayor Johnny Ford made a promise to Charlie Pollard.
A “fairly well-to-do local farmer, Pollard had been approached by men from the United States Public Health Service in 1932 and offered a free physical examination at a nearby school. The medics told him he had “bad blood.”
Pollard had never heard of it, but doctors offered him and more than 600 Black men in Macon County, Alabama, free medical care for the ailment. They would never receive adequate treatment.
The “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” was an observation “in nature” meant to follow the subjects’ until death to examine the fatal venereal disease’s undisturbed effects. When penicillin was discovered as an effective cure in 1945, the men were denied the life-saving treatment. When some sought care from county doctors, the physicians were advised by USPHS officials against treating them.