Читать книгу The Tuskegee Syphilis Study - Fred Gray - Страница 11

A person who was not living in Tuskegee and Macon County in 1932 can hardly imagine what life was like at that time and place. It is hard even for me, and I was born in 1930, in Montgomery, the adjacent county southwest of Macon. To begin with, there were vast material differences. That was long before automatic transmissions in automobiles, televisions, and most of the modern conveniences that we take for granted today. Very few people had ever flown in an airplane. No one had ever heard of an interstate highway. In Macon County and similar rural parts of the Deep South in 1932, most people did not have plumbing, electricity, telephones, and cars, all of which are considered necessities of life now. It truly was a different world then.

Beyond the material, there were the differences in society and culture. Of course, when I speak to schoolchildren today, I am always a little startled by the realization that almost two generations have now reached adulthood in Alabama with no personal knowledge of “colored” water fountains, Jim Crow public accommodations, racial restrictions on voting and jury service, and so forth. This is not to say that all racial problems have been solved, but simply to acknowledge that the South of today is light-years from what it was in 1932.

The part of Alabama which extends from east central Alabama, where Macon County is located, on through Montgomery, Lowndes, Wilcox, Dallas, Sumter, Greene, and Pickens counties to the Mississippi line, is called “the Black Belt.” All of these counties have a majority black population, and many people think the Black Belt is called that because of its demographics. The name was actually bestowed by geologists because of the area’s rich, dark soil composition. Nevertheless, while the dark soil was exceptionally fertile, its richness was realized largely through the labor of dark Alabamians. Coincidentally, the name of my publisher, Black Belt Press, is also derived from this region of Alabama which is well-known for its distinctive geographic and socio-political characteristics. Because most people outside Alabama associate “black belts” with martial arts, Black Belt Press prints an explanatory statement (see page 4) in every book it publishes. This statement is a good summary of the culture of the place and hints at the societal extremes—“it was and is a place of great beauty, of extreme wealth and grinding poverty, of pain and joy”—which have existed virtually since Alabama became a state in 1819.

As a center of cotton culture, the Black Belt had a high African American population from the time the first European settlers arrived, bringing with them African slaves. Some of the richest land in Macon County had been a part of the Creek Nation until the cessions of 1832. After the removal of the Indians—another tragic episode in American history—planters and slaves poured into the area. This was a result of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which authorized the President to negotiate with the Indian tribes east of the Mississippi River for the purchase of their land. The Choctaw, Creek, Tuskegee, Eufaula, Coosa, Alabama, Koweta, Kashita, and other Native American tribes and languages had been early occupants of what is now the State of Alabama. Ultimately, many Indians were isolated far from their fertile homelands on barren, barely habitable land in various desolate areas of the western United States.

Prosperity in Macon County did not last, however, because by 1850 the harsh agricultural practices of the time had “farmed out” some of the best cropland. Between the agricultural decline and the upheaval of the Civil War, Macon County actually lost population in the middle third of the nineteenth century. Still, after emancipation, most of the former slaves stayed in the area and continued to till the soil as sharecroppers or tenant farmers or simply as hired laborers for the white landowners. By 1930, Macon County’s population was 27,103, of which 22,320 were African American. According to government statistics, the average income in Macon County was only one to two dollars a day. The 1940 census showed that there were 5,205 farm dwelling units in the county, of which 4,500 were in need of major repairs, had no running water, no electricity, and no toilet within the structure.

In other words, conditions were bad in Macon County in 1932. There were only two incorporated towns, Tuskegee and Notasulga. The Great Depression had begun, and it was harder than ever to earn a living.

Racial Conditions in Alabama

Another very important element which must be considered is the racial climate in Alabama from 1932 to 1954. At that time, in Alabama and throughout the South, everything was rigidly segregated based on race. The laws of the State of Alabama required the complete separation of whites and blacks in public accommodations and in almost all other aspects of life. The United States Supreme Court held in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) that the State of Louisiana could segregate passengers by race on trains traveling in that State so long as the facilities were substantially equal. This was the beginning of the doctrine of “separate but equal,” though in practice the result was separate but unequal because facilities provided for “coloreds” rarely if ever were the same as those provided for whites. In 1938, the Court extended that doctrine to education in the case of Gaines v. Canada, ex rel. We were thus plagued with “separate but equal” until May 17, 1954. On that day, the Supreme Court held in Brown v. Board of Education that separate educational facilities were inherently unequal and that the doctrine of “separate but equal” had no place in the field of education. However, when the Study started, segregation was the law of the land.

In addition, during the beginning and extending into the early phase of the Study, African Americans were still being lynched with sickening regularity. The lives of African Americans in Alabama during that period of time were not worth very much. It was during this time also that the infamous Scottsboro Boys Case was making headlines in Alabama and across the nation. This is a case in which two white women accused several African Americans of raping them in north Alabama. Ultimately, in a trial which legal experts have considered biased and based on suspect evidence, the accused were convicted and given life sentences. Several died in prison; one, late in life, was granted a pardon. The point is, that given the racial conditions of the day, it was not difficult for the average white person in Alabama to participate in the Study of untreated syphilis on African American men.

Tuskegee Institute

Because of the existence of Tuskegee Institute, led by Booker T. Washington, there were a larger than average number of well-educated, what would now be called middle-class, African Americans living in Tuskegee. Yet most of the African Americans in Macon County were not middle-class professionals. Most were farmers, a few on their own land but usually on land owned by the white minority. This was still a cotton culture, and cotton culture throughout the Deep South was originally based on slavery and then on tenancy and sharecropping. By the time the Tuskegee Syphilis Study began in 1932, Professor George Washington Carver had already made Tuskegee Institute even more famous by his scientific experiments in agriculture, particularly in developing many uses for peanuts and sweet potatoes. As Robert J. Norrell writes in his book, Reaping the Whirlwind, about Tuskegee’s civil rights history, Carver’s work had not yet changed the dominant agricultural model in Macon County:

The Institute’s efforts to improve farming practices apparently benefited black farmers in Macon County only marginally. Charles S. Johnson, the prominent sociologist at Fisk University, surveyed 612 black farm families in the county in the early 1930s and found that little had changed for the better for black farmers since the end of slavery. Indeed, many things had gotten worse: Land ownership had declined relentlessly. More and more black farmers had become sharecroppers, deepening their dependence on white landlords; ninety percent of those surveyed were tenants. They all told him the same thing: sharecropping allowed almost no room for blacks to improve themselves. “They manage to live on advances,” Johnson wrote, “or by borrowing for food and clothing and permitting their crop to be taken in satisfaction of the debt.” For the black tenant, there was very little of the independence that Booker Washington had envisioned. “When you working on a white man’s place,” one man told Johnson, “you have to do what he says, or treat, trade or travel.” The tenant system belied the earlier faith in the curative power of education for blacks: Johnson discovered that black men with more than an elementary education were likely to quit farming altogether. The most successful tenant farmers were those with a bare minimum of education—the ones literate enough to make the best of the situation, but not so well educated as to view it as intolerable.

This was a brutal economic model. That sharecroppers were not far removed from slavery was also pointed out by H. L. Mitchell, one of the founders of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, in his autobiography, Mean Things Happening in This Land. He describes what this life was like:

For a sharecropper, the day started before dawn. The plantation bell was the first sound he heard upon awakening. His wife was soon getting a fire going in the cookstove. A cup of cheap coffee started the day off. She put biscuits in the oven to be eaten with molasses and fat back meat by the adults. There was cornmeal mush for the young ones. First the man would go to the plantation barn where the hostler assigned a mule to him. He harnessed it and was in the cotton field before sun was up. The day’s work was well underway by sunrise, and it didn’t end until after sundown. The plantation riding boss would be in the field supervising the croppers’ work . . . In addition to seeing to it that each sharecropper was in the field and plowing his rows straight, the rider represented the law to both black and white sharecroppers alike. He replaced the slave driver of pre-Civil War days. The emancipation of the slaves put both black and white poor landless people to sharecropping—a new form of slavery.

Normally the work on the cotton plantations was well underway by March 1st. The land was first broken, then harrowed, and the rows were laid out for planting the cottonseed by the time the frost was out of the ground. March 1st was “Furnish Day,” when the company store opened its doors to the sharecroppers to take on credit. Each family was entitled to draw its groceries and other supplies. There was a credit limit based on one dollar per month for each acre in cotton the cropper was to cultivate and harvest that year. The “furnish” was allowed only until the crops were laid by in July. Usually by about the 4th of July nearly all the work was done in the cotton fields, until picking time in the fall.

Cotton planting started in April. A single-row cottonseed planter was driven down each row in the field, dropping the seeds and lightly covering them. In a couple of weeks, depending on the weather, the cotton plants pushed through the soft crust of soil. When the plants were firmly set and up to the right height, the sharecropper took a special plow to scrape the weeds and dirt away from his cotton. Great skill was required to scrape the cotton on each side of the row, leaving the plants still with a firm foundation. Then the sharecropper’s wife and all children old enough to chop came to the fields with long-handled hoes to thin the cotton to a stand. As it was chopped and thinned, the sharecropper used another plow to gently cover the row without destroying the plant.

The weeding of the cotton continued along with the plowing for at least six weeks. Everyone who was old enough to swing a hoe was needed to keep the field clean of weeds. The sharecropper kept his cultivator and his mule going from daybreak to dark. There would be a hurried meal in the middle of the day. Sometimes, if the work was going well, everyone had a short nap, resting on the shady side of the house . . . If a family was caught up with the work on its own piece of land, its members were often called upon to help other croppers who had fallen behind. Also, the owner might have a day-labor crop, where there was some extra work to be done. Usually there was a fixed wage for such work, 75 cents a day for grown folks, 40 cents for the young ones. I often worked chopping cotton back in Tennessee for 50 cents a day when I was growing up. By the time I was fifteen I was paid a man’s wage . . . however, wages were seldom ever paid in cash. The family was just given credit for its account at the company store. Sometimes payment was made by printed pieces of paper to exchange for goods at the company store. These slips showed that the bearer was due the amount shown on the cover, and they came to be known as “doodlum books,” or “due books.” In some places they used pieces of brass: 1¢, 5¢, 10¢, 25¢, 50¢ and $1 pieces, good only at the company store. This money was known as “brozeene.”

The prices at the company store were always much higher than those charged by the few small grocery store operators who managed to survive in town. In addition to the higher prices that the sharecroppers had to pay for basics such as flour, meal, and the fat back meat also called sowbelly, they were charged interest on the “furnish” they received. Usually this was 10 percent per month, on each dollar. An interest rate of 40 percent annually was considered normal . . .

After the crop was laid by in July, there was no more work for the sharecropper and his family until the last of September when the crop was ready to harvest. Naturally, credit was cut off at the commissary. It was a time for hunting, fishing, and going to “big meeting” where hellfire and damnation preachers held forth in the small churches of the black folks, and in hastily erected “brush arbors” for the white folks, which sheltered the sinners from the hot sun. All were there to repent their sins. Sometimes a white evangelist would come along who had his own tent. The plantation owners encouraged and often paid the preachers something extra to conduct the big meetings, so that field hands could hear their troubles blamed upon their sinful ways, rather than on the economic conditions under which they lived. . .

About the middle of September when the cotton started to open, the labor of every man, woman and child was needed in the harvest. Black and white, old and young were all in the fields. Schools, where they existed, always closed for “cotton picking time,” . . . The same thing happened in the spring when schools were let out for “cotton chopping.” . . . Children didn’t get much learning anyway. As soon as a boy became strong enough, he became a plowhand and a valuable addition to the family economic unit. Since plowing was considered man’s work, girls as a rule did not plow, so they got a little more schooling than the boys. Some girls even learned to read and write quite well.

The obstacles to education, especially for African Americans, are stated vividly by historian Robert J. Norrell: “In 1934 the expenditure for each white pupil in Macon County was $65.18 and for each black student $6.58. White teachers’ salaries averaged $867 in 1934, as compared with $348 for blacks. White class enrollment averaged twenty-two students; black schools had almost sixty pupils in each class. County buses transported sixty percent of the white students to school, but no black children. Nearly seventy-five percent of black schools in the county in 1934 had only one teacher.” And all this was, Norrell said, despite the participation in Macon County of the Rosenwald Fund. Julius Rosenwald was a white philanthropist from Chicago who became interested in education in the rural South after talking with Booker T. Washington. Rosenwald’s money helped build a number of black schools in the rural South, and the very first was in Macon County. As we will see, Rosenwald’s philanthropy played a role in the initiation of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, too.

H. L. Mitchell’s description of sharecropping continues:

On some of the plantations, the sharecroppers were allowed to keep half of the money for which the seed was sold when their cotton was ginned. This was “cotton pickin’ money.” Sometimes black sharecroppers carrying their cotton to the gin to be baled were heard to say: “Git that white man’s cotton off my seed.”

After the crop was all about picked out, usually just before Christmas, “settlement time” came. Sharecroppers would gather hopefully at the plantation commissary and the owner or his agent would call each man into the office in turn. The verdict would be handled down something like this: “Well, you had a good year. You raised twenty bales of cotton. We sold it for seven cents a pound, that comes to $35 a bale, or a total of $700. Half of that is yours — $350. BUT you owe $200, plus interest of $80, on the furnish. You know we had to get the doctor when your wife was sick, and we deducted the doctor’s calls and the medicines he gave, and then you bought some clothes for the children, too. The amount due you is $49.50. At least you got some Christmas money.”

. . . Often the crop was not too good, or the sharecropper’s account was over the amount the cotton brought when sold, and the man would then start the next year still in debt. He could not leave the plantation owing a debt. If he found a way to get his things moved at night, the law—usually the deputy sheriff—would be sent to hunt the man down and force him and his family to return. Sometimes a man’s debt would be bought by another plantation owner, and the sharecropper would start off in debt to the new owner. Sometimes a planter to whom a sharecropper owed money would just pass out the word that the sharecropper was unreliable, and no one would let him have a place where he could make a crop. When that happened, his only hope was to find part-time work as a wage laborer, but that was a downward step to an agricultural worker.

H. L. Mitchell was a white man, and his personal experiences as a sharecropper were in Arkansas and Tennessee. But he organized for the Southern Tenant Farmer’s Union in Alabama, too, and he gives a good account of what it was like across the South in this time period. Mitchell’s union, though handicapped by charges that it was Communist-inspired, was a very interesting early example of organizing across racial lines, and some of its leaders later became active participants in the civil rights movement which developed in the forties and fifties. Ned Cobb was an African American farmer in the Notasulga area of Macon County whose involvement with Mitchell’s union led to a violent 1932 confrontation with the law that was memorialized in the epic poem “In Egypt Land” by the Alabama poet John Beecher. From that poem, the author Ted Rosengarten later tracked Cobb down and further popularized his life, as “Nate Shaw,” in the oral autobiography All God’s Dangers. And Ralph Ellison describes life in Macon County during this era in his classic novel, Invisible Man.

For the purpose of examining the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the point is that the men who were chosen as participants for this study came out of the cotton culture of the 1930s. They were for the most part very poor, not well educated, worked very hard in a cruel economic situation, and were by custom and social conditions accustomed to submitting to authority and uniforms, whether that uniform was that of the law or the white coats and dresses of doctors and nurses.

As for those doctors and nurses, health care in 1932 was largely inaccessible in Macon County. There were very few doctors in Macon County and only two hospitals. Macon County Hospital was exclusively used by whites, and John A. Andrew Memorial Hospital was located on the campus of Tuskegee Institute. Andrew Memorial Hospital’s primary purpose was to provide health care for the students and officials of the College. It was also the center for providing health care for the local African American community, particularly for maternity patients, infant care, and treatment for tuberculosis. Dr. Eugene Dibble and Dr. Thomas Campbell were the only African American doctors in Macon County, and they were connected with John A. Andrew Memorial Hospital.

Historian Robert J. Norrell referred to sociologist Charles S. Johnson’s research in Macon County. That research was part of a study financed by the Rosenwald Fund to study the extent of syphilis in the county. Norrell writes:

Physicians working for the United States Public Health Service discovered in 1930 that thirty-six percent of fourteen hundred black men examined had the disease. They also found that health conditions for rural blacks in Macon County were miserable generally. Their diet consisted largely of salt pork, hominy grits, cornbread, and molasses; fresh meat, fresh vegetables, fruit, and milk were rarely included. Malnutrition was chronic, and they were afflicted by many diet-related illnesses. Most of the county’s poor blacks could not afford medical care.

I have to point out that a similar survey would have found much the same thing if it had examined the poorest whites in the county, too, for their health conditions were not much better. However, a greater proportion of blacks were in these circumstances, and even the poorest whites did not carry the additional burden of legalized segregation. Nevertheless, in the thirties, most rural people simply did not have medical care. Children were born at home with their births assisted not by doctors but by midwives. Very few African Americans were treated by a doctor, and for African American males, the percentage was even lower. I am sure that only a handful of the 623 participants in the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, prior to being involved, had ever been treated by a physician. This was the state of health care in Macon County at the time the men were selected to enter the Experiment.