Conscience and Courage in the Face of Systemic Injustice

Do you know the name Peter Buxtun? Few people do. However, to a special group of illiterate Black sharecroppers in Macon County, Georgia, his name will always be associated with outstanding courage and conscience that speaks up when systemic injustice occurs. For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis. These men, for the most part illiterate sharecroppers from one of the poorest counties in Alabama, were never told what disease they were suffering from or of its consequences. Their value lay only in the autopsies that would be conducted on their corpses after the disease was allowed to rob them of life. This cruel experiment was entitled The Tuskegee Study.

In 1966, Peter Buxtun, waiting to be admitted to Hastings Law School, got a job doing venereal disease interviews at the Public Health Department’s Hunt Street Clinic in San Francisco. He was horrified when he overheard several of his co-workers discussing the Tuskegee Study, and learned they’d been told not to treat the participants. He wrote the CDC (Center for Disease Control) in Atlanta and requested additional information. “In early November 1966, Buxtun sent Dr. William J. Brown, the director of the Division of Venereal Diseases, a letter . . . expressing grave moral concerns about the experiment. He asked whether the purpose of the experiment was to obtain information ‘on the syphilitic damage which these men were being allowed to endure.’ He also inquired if any of the men had been treated properly and whether any had been told the nature of the study. And finally, he asked, ‘are untreated syphilitics still being followed for autopsy?’”

When Dr. Brown received Peter’s letter, he was furious. He invited Peter to come to Atlanta to attend a scientific meeting at the government’s expense. When Peter arrived at the CDC, Dr. Brown escorted him into “an executive conference room with a big mahogany table surrounded by a dozen or so chairs.” Two men were waiting for him. One of them was: “. . . Dr. John Cutler, a health officer with intimate knowledge of the study.”

According to Buxtun, Dr. Cutler began to harangue him the moment they were seated. ‘He was infuriated,’ stated Buxtun. ‘He had obviously read my material, thought of me as some form of a lunatic who needed immediate chastisement and he proceeded to administer it.’ Dr. Cutler then launched an impassioned defense of the experiment, stressing, in particular, how it would benefit physicians who were treating syphilitic blacks.”

James Jones, author of “Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment,”  described what happened next: “Buxtun was neither intimidated nor impressed.” He told the officials they were using blacks as “human substitutes for guinea pigs,” and warned them that the Public Health Service would be discredited if the public learned what they were doing.

Peter resigned from the PHS in 1967, and he wrote Dr. Brown another letter in November 1968. This time he warned him: “The group is 100 percent Negro. . . . This in itself is political dynamite and subject to wild journalistic misinterpretation.”

Dr. Brown showed the letter to Dr. David Sencer, the director of the CDC. Neither official thought they were doing anything wrong, but they decided to convene a “blue-ribbon panel” to evaluate the study. Dr. Gene Stollerman was chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of Tennessee at the time, and the only member of the blue-ribbon panel who: “. . . did not have previous knowledge of the Tuskegee Study before being asked to review it.” He was . . . “the only panelist who saw the subjects as patients, and thought that they had a right to be treated.”

Everyone at the CDC supported the program and thought it should continue until the last participant was autopsied. Buxtun’s moral indignation was attributed to his youth and “generation.” Peter realized something had to be done, so he contacted a reporter and told her about the study.

She contacted her editor; he assigned another woman to the story. On July 25, 1972, the Washington Star published her article. The American people were outraged when they read about the racist project. Public health officials tried to justify the program because it was done for “science,” but no one believed them. The Tuskegee Study ended that year, forty years after it began. Every survivor received $10,000.

Recently, a group of students at Yale University and the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) were asked to define ‘courage.’ As part of their response, they described acts of courage, including (one who)  “stands up to unjust social practices because of what one thinks right.”  Would you not agree that this definition fits the actions of Peter Buxtun? Are such men of courage and conscience still needed today?

Ongoing systemic injustice by government organizations that includes psychological attacks such as ‘gang-stalking’ and the use of covert remote methods of torture on American citizens is every bit as shocking and abhorrent as the Tuskegee Study. My story and that of many other victims speaks of a systemic injustice that has been practiced for years by covert federal and local agencies. Injustice festers, spreads and weakens all strata of human society in the absence of conscience and courage. It is our hope that men and women  of outstanding conscience and courage like Peter Buxtun still exist in our government today.

References:
The Radio Liberty Newsletter

Read the full story at http://www.badexperiment.com