On this day in 1972, whistleblower Peter Buxtun, a social worker and epidemiologist, leaked the story of the Tuskegee Experiments to the Washington Star, leading to a national scandal and the study's quick termination.

The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, more commonly known as simply the "Tuskegee Experiments", was an unethical study done by United States Public Health Service (PHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), where black study participants were not told of their syphilitic condition, given toxic treatments, and falsely told they were receiving free healthcare from the federal government. All of its participants were poor, rural black men with very limited access to health information.

In November 1966, Buxtun had filed an official protest on ethical grounds with the PHS's "Division of Venereal Diseases" and another protest in November 1968, however his concerns were dismissed both times. In 1968, black statistician and PHS employee William Carter Jenkins also called for an end to the study in his magazine The Drum.

It wasn't until Buxtun leaked the story to the Washington Star that the study became public knowledge and a national scandal. In 1974, as part of the settlement of a class action lawsuit filed by the NAACP on behalf of study participants and their descendants, the U.S. government paid $10 million ($51.8 million in 2019) and agreed to provide free medical treatment to surviving participants and surviving family members infected as a consequence of the study.

The Tuskegee Experiments were not the only syphilis experiments performed by the U.S. government against non-white people - from 1946 to 1948, the U.S. conducted a similar study in Guatemala in which doctors infected soldiers, prostitutes, prisoners and mental patients with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases, without the informed consent of the subjects, leading to at least 83 deaths.

The experiments were led by physician John Charles Cutler, who also participated in the late stages of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. Cutler never faced criminal charges for his actions.

Please :vote: for a New Comm called c/Labour :worker: A union / labour organizing specific comm :iww:

Here is a list of Trans rights organizations you can support :cat-trans:

Buy coffee and learn more about the Zapatistas in Chiapas here :EZLN:

Resources for Palestine :palestine-heart:

Here are some resourses on Prison Abolition :brick-police:

Foundations of Leninism :USSR:

:lenin-shining: :unity: :kropotkin-shining:

Anarchism and Other Essays :ancom:

Remember, sort by new you :LIB:

Yesterday’s megathread :sad-boi:

Follow the Hexbear twitter account :comrade-birdie:

THEORY; it’s good for what ails you (all kinds of tendencies inside!) :RIchard-D-Wolff:

COMMUNITY CALENDAR - AN EXPERIMENT IN PROMOTING USER ORGANIZING EFFORTS :af:

Come listen to music with your fellow Hexbears in Cy.tube :og-hex-bear:

Queer stuff? Come talk in the Queer version of the megathread ! :sicko-queer:

Join the fresh and beautiful batch of new comms:

!effort@hexbear.net :theory-gary:

!chat@hexbear.net :morshupls:

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So only one winner yesterday so let's all :rat-salute: comrade @context, nice work like usual.

A joke

A parent phoned their kid to ask them to buy a few things they needed for a trip. They told them they would find enough money for the purchases in a envelope on their desk. They found the envelope with 98 written on it.

In a store they bought $90 worth of things, but when it was time to pay they not only didn't have $8 left over but they were short.

By how much, and why?

Like usual have fun :soviet-heart: and remember to dm @Wmill the answer.

This Friday at 8am and 8pm we will be watching Gentlemen of Fortune 1971 :USSR: a Soviet Crime Comedy film about kindergarten teacher (Troshkin) who looks exactly like hardened criminal Beliy and gets recruited by police to infiltrate his old gang in prison (while Beliy himself is doing time in another prison) to find previously stolen helmet of Alexander the Great.

Only on the Hexbear Cytube :hexbear-retro: