Letter to Editor

We were pleased to receive this letter from Meharry graduate and ACU member Pamela H. Payne Foster, MD, MPH, MS (School of Graduate Studies 1986, Medicine 1990) who has recently joined the faculty of Tuskegee University. It speaks to matters that are at the heart of the Journal's mission.

To the Editor:

As I walked with a large procession through the financial district of New York City in the fall of 2003, I could barely feel on my face the cool wind blowing softly through the tall buildings. During beats of the African drums, I thought I heard the soft whispers of my ancestors crying out in pain and despair from their centuries-old burial ground.

I was one of several thousand participants in a procession for reburial of the bones of 400 Africans discovered in lower Manhattan in 1991 in what had been the borough's 18^th-century African Burial Ground. After more than a decade of study and analysis at Howard University in Washington, DC, a week-long schedule of spiritual and sacred events held throughout the Northeastern seaboard culminated with activities in New York. The remains were being returned to their original resting place.

The discovery of the bones was historically significant for many reasons. First, their discovery reminded the American people that enslavement of Africans in this country was not strictly a Southern phenomenon. The bones date back to the early 1700s. The early settlers of colonial New York used enslaved Africans to help build the new land; these Africans built the very wall protecting the financial district after which Wall Street is named. Second, the bones bore signs of the cruelty and abuse often associated with slavery. There was evidence of fractures, other skeletal lesions, and weakened bones due to malnutrition.

During a funeral in the Deep South of Alabama several months later, I recalled the feeling I had on that cool fall day in New York. In Alabama, I was at the funeral of Mr. Ernest Hendon, the last survivor of the infamous United States Public Health Service Syphilis Study (also known as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study). As attendees gave testimonies, I tried only to imagine the pain and agony that Mr. Hendon and his family endured for the long years during and after the study. Mr. Hendon was one of over 600 Black males who unknowingly participated in a study that deliberately withheld treatment from syphilitic participants. For forty years, government scientists observed and documented how syphilis ravaged the human body. Even when penicillin, a much better treatment for syphilis than had been available previously, became more widely available in the 1950s, treatment was denied to the men.

Injustices experienced by the New York African ancestors and the Syphilis Study participants are tied together by the threads of exploitation and racism, both of which are sometimes as evident in silence as in hate speech. Over the Syphilis Study's long duration, researchers spoke in the voice of science in numerous professional journals, but stayed silent about the ethical violations of the study. Throughout the centuries of legal slavery on these shores, many Americans who were not slaveholders never the less stayed deafeningly silent about the institution.

Such racial injustices do a disservice not only to the victims, but also to society as a whole. In order to address injustices, we must first begin to recognize them. In 1997, President Bill Clinton both recognized and addressed the injustices of the United States Public Health Service Syphilis Study through his formal apology for the role of the federal government in carrying it out. It was a first step in the right direction and one that could serve as a model.

I attended Mr. Hendon's funeral in Alabama as a new faculty member at the Tuskegee University National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care. The Center was established in 1999 with a single primary goal: to examine bioethical issues in health that affect underserved communities, particularly African American communities. The Center comes on the scene at a time in this country's history when health disparities between African Americans and...