abama in and around the county seat of Tuskegee, which showed that 4 out of every 100 white males there had syphilis but also that almost twice as many blacks, 7.2 per 100, contracted the disease (Jones 74).
According to Jones, the Tuskegee Experiments originated "as a pioneering piece of public health whose overriding objective was to prove to state and local health officials, as well as private physicians, that rural blacks could be tested and treated for syphilis" (74). However, due to the onset of the Great Depression private and public funds for such an ambitious project were insufficient. At that point, Dr. Taliaferro Clark, the director of PHS' Division of Venereal Diseases, decided to convert the project into a research study of adult black males in the late (tertiary) stage of syphilis. The only known study on the effects of late stage syphilis had been conducted in Norway on white adult males. Many physicians then believed that syphilis had different effects on whites and blacks, affecting mostly neural areas in whites and cardiological areas in blacks. Clark saw the Macon City blacks as "precisely the right kind of subjects . . . syphilitic blacks . . . who had not received any medical treatment" (Jones 91). In addition, the area offered "a well-equipped teaching hospital [John A. Memorial Hospital at Tuskegee Institute, a Negro college which had been founded by Booker T. Washington] that could easily double as a scientific laboratory" (Jones 91).
First Decade Plus (1932-1945). The Tuskegee Experiments began with the selection of 'volunteers' in 1932 in the black community in Macon County. They were not hard to find. The leaders of Tuskegee Institute, local white planters, state and local health officials, and the United States Surgeon General, then and later, gave unwavering support to the project. The 'volunteers," said Jones, came from "a community in which generations of white rule had made black people accustomed...