Why Is The Tuskegee Still Relevant Today

Today, healthcare has advanced through extreme procedures in the past that the United States government will never get to make-up for. Innocents were tortured in hopes that they were leading towards finding a cure for their diseases. The Tuskegee Experiment is one of the first documented experiments in the United States that fully admits to the wrong doings they performed to African Americans in their program. The Tuskegee Experiment was, by definition, the same as a clinical trial in today’s society, but that changed quickly. In 1932, the United States told nearly 400 African Americans that they would get free treatment for their disease. The disease was a form of syphilis that was an epidemic in Macon County. The U.S. government took advantage
The medicine was somewhat working at first, but when funding never became solid, the government employees decided to make the trial into a test of syphilis and how syphilis effects African Americans. In all matters, this trial went from trying to treat African Americans for a disease to testing the African American’s like guinea pigs and letting their disease progressively get worse and worse. Later, the government admitted that there were never any real human protections in the whole experiment and admitted that even the standard treatment, penicillin, was withheld from the test
Walker wrote “Lest we forget: The Tuskegee Experiment” to inform the public about what the government did to African Americans in the 1930s, and what the government is doing today in hopes of righting their wrongs. Walker attempted to bridge the gap between the affected and non-affected by writing article that shows the evil of the experiment and the good the government is doing in attempt to apologize. Walker used statistics proportionally throughout the essay to maintain a balanced, unopinionated essay. Walker did a magnificent job of keeping his personal beliefs out of the paper. Most people would be livid about the fact that African Americans were tested like animals and practically tortured by the government, but instead, Walker chose the point of view that is solely informative in efforts to possibly bridge the gap between the government and primarily African Americans. On a daily basis, ignorant racists claim that racism is dead and was never an actual threat to African Americans, but this article alone proves that African Americans were not only abused, but denied the basic rights that all humans