Say Their Names

by Curtis Bunn

  But they were not given the drug, and twenty-eight of the original 399 black men died of syphilis, one hundred died of related complications, forty of their wives were infected, and nineteen of their children were born with congenital syphilis. That atrocity is the most-cited reason by Black people to pass on medical experiments.

  There was also J. Marion Sims, the malevolent physician who was misguidedly considered the “Father of Modern Gynecology” for his advances in that field. The problem was, he practiced medicine at a time when treating women’s reproductive organs was considered repugnant and rarely done.

  He invented the vaginal speculum, a tool used for dilation and examination. He also pioneered a surgical technique to repair vesicovaginal fistula, a complication of childbirth that was common in the nineteenth century, in which a tear between the uterus and bladder causes constant pain and urine leakage. He performed the experiments that led to these discoveries on enslaved Black women, and without any anesthesia.

  Working in rural Jamaica, John Quier, a British doctor, freely experimented with smallpox inoculation in a population of 850 enslaved people during the 1768 epidemic. Inoculation, a precursor to a vaccine, involved inducing a light case of the disease in a healthy person in hope of immunizing that person for life.

  He used the vulnerable enslaved people to explore questions that doctors in Europe dared not. He wanted to know, for example, whether one could safely inoculate menstruating or pregnant women. Additionally, he wanted to know if it was safe to inoculate newborn infants or a person already suffering from dropsy, yaws, or fever and the like.

  Quier was employed by slave owners and would inoculate for smallpox with or without the enslaved person’s permission for his scientific experiments. Importantly, slave owners had the final word. There was no issue of slave consent or, for that matter, often physician consent. Yet Quier did some inoculations repeatedly on the same person and at his own expense. He took risks beyond what was reasonable to treat the individual patient. Throughout his experiments, when pressed, Quier followed the science and not necessarily what was best for the human being standing in front of him.

  Recently readers and viewers have been introduced to Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman who was betrayed by scientific history, leading to her story being memorialized into a best-selling book and adapted into a film starring Oprah Winfrey. Her cancer cells are the source of the HeLa cell line, the first immortalized human cell line and one of the most important cell lines in medical research. An immortalized cell line reproduces indefinitely under specific conditions, and the HeLa cell line continues to be a source of invaluable medical data.

  Problems remain because Lacks was the unwitting source of these cells from a tumor biopsied during treatment for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore in 1951. George Otto Gey cultured the cells, creating the HeLa cell line. No consent was given by Lacks to culture her cells. Additionally, neither she nor her family were compensated for the extraction or use of the cells.

  Harriet A. Washington, a science writer, editor, and ethicist who authored the eye-opening 2007 book Medical Apartheid, said: “But why have the things that I’ve written about, which were not difficult to find, received so little attention?”

  About two hundred miles north of Savannah, near Atlanta, Ashley Nealy was unfamiliar with Dawn Baker’s story, but she was aware of some of the past crimes against Black bodies. Still, the thirty-two-year-old Black woman decided to participate in the COVID-19 trials, unaware of the reaction she would receive from the Black community.

  “The moment for me was when I heard Dr. Fauci [of the National Institutes of Health] say at a congressional hearing that a vaccine cannot be produced without African Americans,” Nealy said. “That sat with me. I immediately signed up when he mentioned the COVID Prevention Network website. I wasn’t nervous at all originally. I just felt like it was my duty to make sure we were represented. I was so excited that I posted about it on Facebook that day that I signed up. It only received two ‘likes.’

  “One of those ‘likes’ was from a nurse, which was proof that none of my network, who primarily looked like me, was interested in this at all.”

  News outlets learned of Nealy’s commitment and tracked her down, knowing that locating a Black person willing to participate in the trials was a rare find. She was excited to provide details of her journey, hoping it would influence other African Americans to join her—or at minimum change people’s ideas about the importance of the development of a vaccine that would be effective with the Black population.

  “After sharing my story with a local news station in Atlanta, I felt really good. Someone found me on Instagram and messaged me, thanking me for my participation because he lost an aunt to COVID,” she said. “I went to bed that night on an emotional high and woke up with that same feeling because I felt like my story was making a difference.”

  That euphoria was fleeting.

  The news station posted the interview with Nealy on its Facebook page.

  “Perhaps it was naïve of me to think so, but I was not prepared for the backlash that I received,” she said. “I read the first set of comments, which included a meme saying, ‘DUMB YOU ARE,’ that I was ‘a puppet,’ and that I ‘don’t speak for this divine race.’

  “My heart just sank. I didn’t want to read any more, and I told my friend that they were ‘dragging me’ in the comments. She went in and started defending me and encouraged other people to do the same. Someone also said, ‘She must not know about the Tuskegee (Experiment).’ It really hurt and felt like I was committing myself to a cause no one believed in. I did have a good share of positive comments that helped, such as calling me a hero, but out of the six hundred comments or so, most of them were negative and discouraging.”

  The response to Baker’s and Nealy’s altruism reflects the erosion of public trust in the medical community and in America at large from Black people. It is not steeped in paranoia. It is illuminated by history, in every walk of life.

  From the outset of life in the United States to the modern, technological age of 2020—Black life has been mired in actions and events that have destroyed trust in the institutions that are, they have come to believe, designed to oppress, damage, and destroy them.

  “It’s not paranoia,” Rodney Coates, the sociologist, said. “When African Americans came out of slavery, they immediately began to build businesses, expand their communities, and began to assert not only their freedom, but their willingness to join in the quest for the American dream. Thriving communities were the result in places such as Atlanta, Greenwood [in Tulsa, Oklahoma], Chicago, Rosewood, Washington, D.C., Knoxville, Tennessee, New York City, and my hometown in East St. Louis.

  “Then in less than a twenty-year period (from 1906 to 1926) all were destroyed by angry, frustrated, and jealous whites. During the same time, lynching and differential access to finance devastated both the Black farm and the urban landowners. Racist social, political, and governmental policies ensured that no significant Black community would come into being for the next thirty years. Separate but equal, red-lining, disparate economic prospects, the war on crime/drugs, and the creation of the cradle-to-prison pipeline has assured that this process continued long into the future.”

  Nealy chalked up the vitriol she received to ignorance. “I realized they were all just due to a lack of understanding about the clinical trial process and what has been ingrained in our community with the mistrust in medicine. I definitely understood where they were coming from, but it didn’t make the comments sting any less.”

  She and Baker had similar responses to their first injection to initiate the trial.

  “A light cold, nausea, fever, mild body aches, headaches through the night,” Baker recalled. “At first, I was like, ‘Get this poison out of my arm. What have I done?’ But I knew what I went through was nothing compared to what it could mean in helping so many African Americans. That was my sole focal point.”


  They are among a relatively small percentage of Blacks across the country who would participate in the two-year study, taking injections, undergoing examinations, charting their health.

  “It’s all been very overwhelming,” Baker said. “Overwhelming with the criticism; I never expected the harsh backlash. Overwhelming with the praise; my mom made me cry one day when she told me how proud she was of me and my compassion. Overwhelmed with all the pain and death the coronavirus caused. And overwhelmed with the responsibility we all needed to take in order to get past COVID-19.

  “The lack of trust in medical trials is rooted in real issues. I know that. I knew that when I joined the trial. After I took the vaccine, it hurt my heart more that we are not further along when I continued to see the numbers of death and sickness rise, especially among Black people. But despite the trust that so many people don’t have in the system, I had to do something.”

  While her commitment was admirable, Black people received with far less enthusiasm than the rest of the country the news that two coronavirus vaccines were approved by the Food and Drug Administration, even as the pandemic raged at the start of 2021.

  But there was hope on the other side—antiviral drugs that would help cure those who contracted COVID-19. That medicine would come from coronavirus patients who possess “super” antibodies in their blood that can be used or processed to create medicine that wards off the disease. Antibodies are the Y-shaped protein used by the immune system to identify and neutralize foreign objects such as pathogenic bacteria and viruses.

  John Hollis, a Black former sports journalist, was among the fewer than 5 percent of COVID-19 patients in the U.S. who possessed the so-called “super” antibodies that has “propelled new science,” said Dr. Lance Liotta, a George Mason University pathologist who led the school’s antibody study.

  Hollis’s case of “super” antibodies was unique. While others with the coveted blood found that it lost its strength after sixty to ninety days, his maintained 90 percent of its effectiveness ten months after he contracted the coronavirus.

  He was overwhelmed to learn that his blood would be a part of science to help stem the worst pandemic in America in more than a hundred years. “To say this whole surreal experience has been tough to digest is an understatement,” Hollis said. “On the one hand, I am eternally grateful and feel blessed beyond measure to still be healthy and somehow have this rare natural protection against a deadly virus that is making people sick and killing African Americans at such a high rate.

  “But, on the other hand, it makes me ask: ‘Why me? Why have I been spared when so many others weren’t?’

  “But I’ve long preached to my son, Davis, that we all share a responsibility to make the world a better place than it was when we arrived. Never in a million years could I have envisioned this being how I might help do just that.”

  Dealing with Policing in America

  By Keith Harriston

  Dorothy C. Elliott was home in suburban Maryland, about fourteen miles east of the White House. It was a Friday in June, and her year teaching high school business classes was just about over. Earlier that day, she had shopped for bed linens and purchased paisley sheets, a masculine pattern that she knew her sons would like. She was getting ready to go see a movie with the younger of her two sons, John Elliott. He was eleven years old.

  About the same time, her older son, Archie Elliott III—or Artie as friends and family called him—was heading home from his construction job in the nearby northern Virginia suburbs. Artie had had some hard turns in life, including once being shot and wounded outside of a D.C. nightclub, but he had taken to construction work and was sure that it would lead to nothing but good things.

  “After a while working on construction, he would tell me all the time, ‘I’m gonna build you a house,’” Dorothy Elliott recalled.

  Somewhere along the route home, Artie had a drink or two or more. Beer or liquor. That detail doesn’t matter much. The end result does. About three minutes from his family home near District Heights, Maryland, Artie was driving east on Kipling Parkway when District Heights police officer Jason Leavitt spotted the car Artie was driving, which belonged to a female friend, weaving in the roadway. Artie had just passed the huge lot of the First Baptist Church of District Heights on his right. Detached single-family homes lined small lots near the other three corners of the intersection of Kipling Parkway and Marbury Drive.

  Officer Leavitt switched on his marked patrol car’s flashing lights and pulled Artie over. It was about five p.m.

  By then, Dorothy and John had exited their home on a cul-de-sac and settled into her car. All these years later, she’s fuzzy on what movie they had planned to see. But before she started her car, John had to go back inside to use the bathroom. They got out, re-entered their home. The telephone rang.

  “It was some police department,” Dorothy Elliott remembered. “They kept asking me, ‘Are you related to Archie Elliott III?’” She hung up, thinking it was a prank call or something of the sort. The phone rang again. The caller asked the same question: Are you related to Archie Elliott III? “And then the person said, ‘We’re coming over.’ Right away I asked, ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’”

  Hearing one side of that exchange, John’s guts heaved, and he started vomiting. Dorothy remembered screaming and walking out of her home aimlessly on the cul-de-sac. Neighbors who had been watching early local news that late afternoon already knew. Artie was, indeed, dead, killed in a barrage of twenty-two bullets fired from the department-issued handguns of two police officers.

  Artie died with his hands cuffed behind his back, sitting in the front seat of the marked District Heights police cruiser. Fourteen bullets in all pierced his chest, back, buttocks, right arm, and right hand, according to the autopsy by the Maryland Medical Examiner’s Office. He was twenty-four years old. And Black.

  Artie’s death in 1993 at the hands of Officers Jason Leavitt of District Heights police and Wayne Cheney of the Prince George’s County, Maryland, Police Department is a reminder that the phenomenon of a disproportionate number of Black men and women dying after encounters with police officers didn’t start with the death in 2014 of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. It wasn’t spiraling upward with the tragic death captured on video of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, though the deaths of both men launched ongoing protests and campaigns for racial justice. However, it can seem that that is the case, especially when video captures the killings, as in the case of Floyd.

  That thinking is reinforced by the near-daily media reports of Black people shot to death by law enforcement officers—226 killed by police gunfire in 2020 alone.

  Rayshard Brooks, twenty-seven, was shot and killed by an Atlanta police officer. Brooks fell asleep in his car in a fast-food restaurant drive-through. An officer shot Brooks twice in the back after Brooks grabbed the officer’s Taser and tried to use it on the officer before turning to flee. That, according to police body cam footage, was when the officer shot Brooks twice in the back.

  Daniel Prude, forty-one, was naked and experiencing a mental health episode in Rochester, New York, when police responding to a call encountered him in the middle of the street. Officers restrained him and placed a plastic hood over his face. (The hood is meant to avoid spit.) One officer used his weight to hold Prude down against the street. Prude died, according to an autopsy, due to asphyxiation and acute intoxication.

  Breonna Taylor, twenty-six, was shot eight times in her apartment in the early morning in Louisville, Kentucky, when officers executing a no-knock search warrant entered the apartment. Taylor’s boyfriend, thinking a break-in was happening, fired his registered handgun, injuring one of the officers. Taylor died after being shot eight times when officers returned fire.

  Jamarri Tarver, twenty-six, was killed in North Las Vegas, Nevada, after he led police on a chase in an allegedly stolen car. Two officers fired twenty-four shots at Tarver after police say he had used the stolen vehicle as a weapo
n against officers. He died at the scene.

  Tyree Davis, twenty-six, was Tasered and then shot by Chicago police officers after they say he failed to drop a knife when cornered by officers after allegedly stealing something from a dollar store.

  Brandon Roberts, twenty-seven, was shot and killed by Milford, Delaware, officers who responded to his home for a domestic disturbance. Officers said Roberts yielded a large knife in a threatening manner, though his fiancée disputes that account.

  Kwame Jones, seventeen, died after being shot by a police officer in Jacksonville, Florida. Officers said Jones would not stop the car he was driving and had an exchange with officers before he was shot.

  Albert Hughes, forty-seven, was fatally shot by officers in Lawrenceville, Georgia, after he attacked an officer with a chair in a fast-food restaurant. The fatal shot was fired, police said, after a Taser shot was ineffective in stopping Hughes.

  Samuel Mallard, nineteen, was killed by Cobb County, Georgia, SWAT officers when police said Mallard tried to drive away from his home as officers arrived to execute an arrest warrant for his alleged involvement in a number of crimes.

  In 2020, police across the United States shot and killed a Black person at a rate of about one every thirty-eight hours. That is generally consistent with the number of fatal shootings of Black people by police annually since 2015, according to data compiled by the Washington Post. Police shot and killed 5,960 people since 2015, according to the Post data, and Black people accounted for about 36 percent of the victims who were unarmed and about 25 percent of the victims who were armed—largely disproportionate considering that Blacks make up about 13 percent of the U.S. population.

  Of course, the Post’s data would not include Floyd, who died in the emotionally draining nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds that Minneapolis police officer Derek Michael Chauvin pressed his knee down on Floyd’s neck. And it would not include any other man or woman, Black, white, or other, who died by any method other than gunshot. And even the shooting numbers are not complete. Why? There is no federal requirement that law enforcement agencies report to the federal government incidents of use of excessive force by officers.