Tuskegee Syphilis Study

United States, May 16, 1997: Bill Clinton apologizes to the survivors at the White House For forty years, the U.S. Public Health Service watched hundreds of Black men in Alabama go untreated for syphilis. Clinton's apology in the East Room was unusually direct: the government had done something deeply, profoundly, morally wrong, and the men had done nothing wrong but were grievously wronged. Survivors were in the room, and one of them, Herman Shaw, introduced the president, which gave it a force a written statement lacks. What followed was modest, a federal planning grant toward a bioethics center at Tuskegee. The money had come long before, in a $10 million out-of-court settlement in 1974; the apology was what survivors still lacked.