JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
For nearly 40 years, the U.S. Public Health Service left hundreds of Black men in Tuskegee, Ala., untreated for syphilis. It was part of a study that was only stopped after whistleblower Peter Buxtun revealed the unethical and racist experiment to the press. Buxtun died of Alzheimer's disease in California. He was 86. NPR's Debbie Elliott joins us now to talk about the significance of his revelation. Hi, Debbie.
DEBBIE ELLIOTT, BYLINE: Hi there, Juana.
SUMMERS: So Debbie, Peter Buxtun drew public attention to one of the most notorious medical experiments in U.S. history. How did he come to know about it?
ELLIOTT: Well, in the 1960s, Buxtun was a federal public health worker in San Francisco, working on a completely different medical, you know, subject. But he overheard a coworker talking about the study. That study was officially called The Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Man. It had started in 1932. Federal scientists recruited hundreds of Black men from Tuskegee and rural Macon County, Ala. They offered, like, free meals, free checkups, but they never explained that these men would be human subjects in a study designed to deny them medical treatment. And they continued to deny them medical treatment, even once the miracle drug, you know, penicillin, was available. Many died as a result, and, you know, that has led to a lingering mistrust of the health care system, particularly among Black Americans.
SUMMERS: All right. I mean, what was Buxtun's reaction when he heard about this?
ELLIOTT: You know, he was outraged, and he tried to get the attention of higher-ups at the Centers for Disease Control, according to Vanessa Northington Gamble. She's a professor of medical humanities at The George Washington University. Gamble says when that didn't work, he went to the press.
VANESSA NORTHINGTON GAMBLE: But it took the public revelation in a newspaper, I think, that really tapped into the outrage over the study and the racism that was inherent in it.
ELLIOTT: She says Buxtun likened to the treatment of the Black men in Tuskegee to Nazi experiments on Jews. You know, Buxtun's father was Jewish, and his family had immigrated to the U.S. from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939.
SUMMERS: Wow. And Debbie, how exactly did he get this story out there in the public?
ELLIOTT: In 1972, he shared some of his correspondence with the Associated Press. Jean Heller, an investigative journalist with AP at the time, recalls when she opened the letters.
JEAN HELLER: Revulsion - I literally didn't want the story to be true 'cause I could not believe that that could go on in this country - that sort of thing could go on in this country.
ELLIOTT: Now, his revelation and Heller's subsequent investigation resulted in the public outcry. There were congressional hearings and a class-action lawsuit that ended the study after 40 years and wanted $10 million settlement. Descendants of the people in the study say they're grateful to him. I spoke with Lillie Tyson Head. Her father, Freddie Lee Tyson, was one of the men.
LILLIE TYSON HEAD: It takes a lot of, I think, moral fortitude as well as courage to bring out the evilness and - about the inequities in health care.
ELLIOTT: She now runs the foundation Voices for Our Fathers Legacy to honor their stories and their humanity, she says something the federal government denied.
SUMMERS: Debbie, in a few words, anything else you want us to know about Peter Buxtun's life?
ELLIOTT: You know, the AP says he spent years trying to recover some of his family's property that was confiscated by the Nazis, and he was also a frequent speaker about the syphilis study.
SUMMERS: That's NPR's Debbie Elliot. Debbie, thank you.
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