9: Race and Ethnicity.2: Sociological Models of Social Class

 Three North American Indians, ca. 1836, George Catlin (oil on canvas)

 Credit: Bridgeman Art Library/SuperStock Imagine that you are an African American man living in Macon County, Alabama, during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

 Your home is a little country shack with a dirt floor. You have no electricity or running water. 

You never finished grade school, and you make a living, such as it is, by doing odd jobs. 

You haven’t been feeling too good lately, but you can’t afford a doctor. Then you hear incredible news. 

You rub your eyes in disbelief. It is just like winning the lottery! If you join Miss Rivers’ Lodge (and it is free to join), you will get free physical examinations at Tuskegee University for life. 

You will even get free rides to and from the clinic, hot meals on examination days, and a lifetime of free treatment for minor ailments.

 You eagerly join Miss Rivers’ Lodge. 

After your first physical examination, the doctor gives you the bad news. 

“You’ve got bad blood,” he says. “That’s why you’ve been feeling bad. 

Miss Rivers will give you some medicine and schedule you for your next exam. 

I’ve got to warn you, though. If you go to another doctor, there’s no more free exams or medicine.” 

You can’t afford another doctor anyway. 

You are thankful for your treatment, take your medicine, and look forward to the next trip to the university. 

What has really happened? 

You have just become part of what is surely slated to go down in history as one of the most callous experiments of all time, outside of the infamous World War II Nazi and Japanese experiments.

 With heartless disregard for human life, the U.S. Public Health Service told 399 African American men that they had joined a social club and burial society called Miss Rivers’ Lodge. 

What the men were not told was that they had syphilis, that there was no real Miss Rivers’ Lodge, that the doctors were just using this term so they could study what happened when syphilis went untreated.

 For 40 years, even after penicillin was used to treat syphilis, the “U.S. Public Health Service” allowed these men to go without treatment—and kept testing them each year—to study the progress of the disease. 

The “U.S. public health” officials even had a control group of 201 men who were free of the disease (Jones 1993; Hall 2019). 265 By the way, the men did receive a benefit from “Miss Rivers’ Lodge,” a free autopsy to determine the ravages of syphilis on their bodies.