The NorthStar’s Week in Black History

August 30 through September 5

August 30

1932 ----- The United States Public Health Service, in conjunction with the Tuskegee Institute, conducted an infamous clinical study of syphilis from this date until 1972.  Black men were used exclusively as the research subjects.  A whistleblower’s report brought the specious 40-year study to a halt.

Study researchers recruited poor, uneducated African-American men, most of whom were sharecroppers from rural Macon County, Ala., to study the progression of syphilis in the body. The incidence of syphilis was high in Macon County and in other areas of the country.

Of the participants in the study, 329 had already contracted syphilis, and 201 were syphilis-free.  The study’s subjects were told only that medical researchers were investigating “bad blood.”

In return for taking part in the study, research subjects were given free medical care, free meals and free burial insurance.  None of those already afflicted with syphilis were told of their health status, and they were not treated for the disease.

The syphilis study was controversial and criticized sharply as racist, unethical, immoral and endangering. Penicillin was administered to treat syphilis effectively as early as 1947.  The drug was life-saving.  Syphilis left untreated in research subjects progressed, wrecked havoc in the affected men’s bodies and caused the deaths of many.  Untreated research subjects also infected their wives and girlfriends, and many of the children resulting from these unions were born with congenital syphilis.

A report on the research project, published by the Associated Press in 1972, drew reactions of public outrage, and an investigation of the project ensued. Given the findings of the investigators, the assistant secretary of health and scientific affairs ordered the study closed.

By the study’s forced end, 100 of the men participating in the study died of syphilis or syphilis-related causes. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study led to major changes in U.S. law governing the regulation of government-sponsored research projects.

In 1973, a class-action suit was filed on behalf of the study participants and their families.  A year later, a $10 million out-of-court settlement was reached. Lifetime free medical care was offered to research survivors, and free burial services were promised as well. In 1975, the wives and children of the men who had participated in the study were included in the suit.

In May 1997, President Bill Clinton offered a formal, public apology to the survivors of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. No attempt at an apology had been made previously.

(Editor’s note:  Two well-researched books, one devoted to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and one reporting the history of racist medical practices in the United States, offer in-depth information on this subject. The books are, James H. Jones’ Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (Free Press, revised edition, 1992) and Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (Anchor, 2008) by Harriet A. Washington.)


August 31


1935 ----- Leroy Eldridge Cleaver, author and leader of the Black Panther Party, was born on this date in Wabbaseka, Ark.  He was raised in Phoenix and Los Angeles, imprisoned for serious crimes throughout his life and became a leader of the Black Power Movement.

Cleaver was arrested and charged with misdemeanors as an adolescent. He was sent to Soledad State Prison in 1954 for possession of marijuana. At 22, Cleaver, an acknowledged serial rapist, was convicted of sexual assault with the intent to murder, and he spent nine years in prison --- first at San Quentin and then at Folsom State Prison.

During the second period of incarceration, Cleaver read, studied and wrote political and philosophical essays, pieces that were later the basis of his first book, Soul on Ice (Ramparts Press, Inc.), published in 1968.

Very soon after he was released from prison, Cleaver joined the Black Panther Party. He was given the position of Minister of Information.

Approximately two years after he joined the Party, Cleaver was involved in a 1968 shootout with police in Oakland, Calif.  He was charged with attempted murder, but he fled, first to Cuba, then to Algeria and then to France.

Cleaver returned to the United States in 1975, renounced the Black Panther Party and declared that he was a “born-again” Christian.  He also held and espoused significantly more conservative political  views.

In 1979, Cleaver published his second book, Soul on Fire (Hodden).

During the 1980s, Cleaver became disillusioned with evangelical Christianity,  and he explored other religions, eventually being baptized into the Church of Latter-Day Saints.

He also joined the Republican Party, appeared and spoke at Republican events in California and ran for the Senate on the Republican ticket in 1986, a race he lost.  He was treated for a crack cocaine addiction in 1990, but was arrested for possession by Oakland and Berkeley police in 1992 and 1994.

Eldridge Cleaver died in 1998 of prostate cancer and complications associated with diabetes.  He was 62.


September 1

1977 ----- Ethel Waters, gospel, blues and jazz singer and stage, film and television actress, died at age 80 on this date.  During her lifetime, she became one of America’s most-beloved performers.

As a young woman, Waters sang on the black vaudeville circuit.  In 1921, she began her recording career, singing “The New York Glide” and “At the New Jump Steady Ball.”  Waters was the fifth black woman in America to record her music. She continued to sing throughout her career, often performing with major performers of the era, including Count Basie during the 1940s.

In 1933, Waters starred in the film Rufus Jones for President, which featured an all-black cast.  That same year, she also opened in a Broadway musical revue, As Thousands Cheer, the only black performer in an all-white production.

In 1943, Ethel Waters was one of the principal cast members in the groundbreaking big-screen musical, Cabin in the Sky.  The film boasted an all-black cast that also included Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, Lena Horne and Louis Armstrong.

In 1949, Waters was nominated for best supporting actress for her role in the film Pinky.  Back to Broadway, she played a major role in Carson Mc Cullers’ The Member of the Wedding, for which she won the New York Drama Critics Award for best supporting actress.  The play was made into a film in 1952.

After her triumph on Broadway, Waters was cast in 1950 as a maid in the then-new weekly ABC television series, Beulah.  Blacks protested the show’s stereotyping of black characters, and the critics panned the show for the same reason.  Ethel Waters quit the show, saying that the role of Beulah was demeaning to her and demeaning to all African Americans.  Waters was replaced by actress Louise Beavers.

Waters continued acting and in 1962 won an Emmy for an outstanding single dramatic performance by an actress in the popular CBS television series Route 66.

She wrote her memoirs in two different books, published more than 20 years apart.  The first volume, His Eye is on the Sparrow:  An Autobiography, was published in 1951 and the second volume, To Me It’s Wonderful, was released in 1972.

In 1983, Waters was inducted posthumously into the Gospel Hall of Fame.  In 1994, the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative postage stamp in her honor. In 2007, she was inducted into the Christian Music Hall of Fame.

(Editor's note:  Please view this week's video, an entertaining five-minute film clip of Ethel Waters, Lena Horne, Eddie "Rochester" Anderson and other cast members, performing in A Cabin in the Sky.)


September 2

1766 ----- The grandson of slaves, James Forten, entrepreneur, inventor and abolitionist, was born on this date in Philadelphia.  In his lifetime, he would become one of the wealthiest and most influential African Americans of his day.

Educated in a Quaker school for black children, Forten began working at the age of seven, shortly after his father died.  He left school at nine to work full-time and help his mother support the household.  At 15, he served during the Revolutionary War on the privateer Royal Louis.

While in service at sea, he invented a device to handle the ship’s sails.  When the ship was captured by the British, he was saved from slavery because he was the best friend of the son of the Royal Louis’ captain.  He was, however, imprisoned on an English prison ship.

At the war’s end, Forten apprenticed as a sailmaker and was so adept and respected at this trade that he opened his own sail-making company.  His company became successful rapidly, and Forten became wealthy.

A strong civic leader who donated handsomely to the abolitionist cause, Forten in 1833 helped fellow abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and Robert Purvis form the American Anti-Slavery Society.  He also wrote editorials for the society's newspaper, The Liberator.

Forten’s home was a station in the Underground Railroad system, and a section of his home was also set aside and equipped as a school for young black children.

James Forten died in 1842 at 75.  Black history scholar Molefi Kete Asante included Forten on his list, 100 Greatest African Americans.


September 3

1919 ----- Lincoln Motion Picture Co., owned by Noble Johnson and Clarence Brooks, released A Man’s Duty, on this date in Omaha, Neb., where company was founded before moving to Los Angeles and incorporating there.

The five-reel film involved two men competing for the affection of a young woman, according to the American Film Institute.

Johnson and Brooks founded Lincoln in 1915 to produce and distribute quality films about African Americans that weren’t embarrassing slapstick comedies.  It is believed to be the first motion picture company owned by African Americans

These films played to packed houses in black neighborhoods in the United States, Cuba, and the Bahamas.

Lincoln also produced:

• The Realization of a Negro's Ambition (1916);

• Trooper of Company K (1917), a recreation of a true story of the massacre in 1916 of black troops in the Army’s 10th Cavalry by Mexican bandits and revolutionaries. The movie, filmed in California’ San Gabriel Valley, featured a cast of more than 300 extras.

• The Law of Nature (1917)

• By Right of Birth (1921)

A shoestring operation, Lincoln Motion Picture went out of business in 1923.


September 4

1875 ----- The Clinton Massacre, which signaled the beginning of the end of Reconstruction, began on this day and ended two days later in Clinton, Miss. It erupted in downtown Clinton during a political rally involving 3,000 people. The uprising was related to the contemporary Reconstruction movement under the Republican-led United States government.

Approximately 50 people, including 20 to 30 blacks were murdered.The lack of response from the U.S. government in retaliation foreshadowed the end of Reconstruction, according to historians.


September 5

1859 ----- Our Nig, a book written by Harriet E. Wilson, became the first novel published in the United States by an African American on this date. Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black,  was published anonymously in 1859 in Boston. It was not widely known or read.

The novel is a rare, powerful and disturbing narrative of the experience of being African American in 19th-century America.

The novel was rediscovered in 1982 by scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who documented it as the first African-American novel published in the United States. Wilson was a biracial woman who grew up New Hampshire.

In 2006, a full-size bronze memorial statue of Harriet Wilson was installed in Milford, N. H.  The statue was the first statue in the state to honor a person of color.

For more information about Harriet Wilson, visit online www.harrietwilsonproject.org


The NorthStar's This Week in Black History is compiled and written
by Frederick H. Lowe and Susan M. Miller.