Tuskegee Syphilis Study: The Real Story and Beyond, The

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study: The Real Story and Beyond. By Fred D. Gray. Montgomery: Black Belt Press, 1998. 175 pp. $16.95 (paper). ISBN 1-5796-012-6.

In a legal career spanning nearly half a century, Fred Gray has made stupendous contributions to the African American struggle for equality. As a young man armed with a law degree from Western Research University (now Case Western Reserve University), Gray adopted an instrumental view of the law and wielded it like a club to strike heavy blows on behalf of racial justice. While still in his early twenties, he represented Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. in Montgomery at the dawn of the Civil Rights movement. Later cases, such as Times a Sullivan, Sellers v Trussell, and Gomillion v Lightfoot, solidified his reputation as one of the Civil Rights movement's most gifted legal advocates. During his incredibly active and eventful life, Gray has also served as a preacher for the Church of Christ and as one of the first black members of the Alabama House of Representatives since Reconstruction.

In his important autobiography, Bucs Ride to Justice (Montgomery, 1995), Gray devoted a brief chapter to his heroic efforts to secure justice for the victims of the Tuskegee Study. The longest nontherapeutic experiment in medical history, the Tuskegee Study was a forty-year ( 193272) deathwatch in which the United States Public Health Service deliberately withheld treatment from hundreds of African American men who had syphilis. In The Tuskegee Syphilis Study Gray describes the case in much more satisfying detail.

Gray got involved with the Tuskegee Study immediately after Jean Heller, a reporter for the Associated Press, broke the story in August 1972. Charles Pollard, a subject in the experiment who happened to be one of Gray's clients, came to see him after reading Heller's article. Correctly concluding that he and the other subjects had suffered grievous harm, Pollard asked his attorney to sue.

It was not an easy case. Carefully and patiently Gray describes the legal obstacles (evidentiary problems, statute of limitations concerns, etc.) that seemed to mitigate against legal action. (Small wonder he was turned down by the many law firms he approached for assistance with the case.) Gray believed in the case and financed the expenses from his own pocket, but it never went to trial. Instead, Gray and attorneys from the Justice Department negotiated an out-of court settlement under which the government agreed to provide cash payments and free medical care to the subjects who survived and to the families of the deceased.

As a chronicle of one man's struggle to secure equal protection under the law for African Americans, Gray's book is an important primary document in American history. In addition to his valuable discussion of the legal case, he does a fine job of describing the experiment's legacy of suspicion and mistrust in the black community. This, in turn, goes a long way toward explaining why so many African Americans do not trust medical researchers today. Gray also sets the record straight on the circumstances that led to the formal apology delivered by President William J. Clinton at the White House in May 1997. That Gray played a pivotal role in bringing about the apology should surprise no one. We all have Fred Gray to thank for much of the progress that has been made in the United States in securing justice for African Americans during the second half of this century.

JAMES H. JONES

University of Houston

Copyright University of Alabama Press Jul 2000
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