Jay

In 1997, five old men were flown to the White House so that a President of the United States could apologise to them in person. They were the last survivors of the Tuskegee syphilis study. The oldest man to speak was ninety-four. He had been lied to by the United States government for forty years. Herman Shaw. The study ran from 1932 to 1972. Six hundred Black men in Macon County, Alabama — three hundred and ninety-nine of them with syphilis — were told they were being treated for "bad blood." They were not treated. That was the point. The researchers wanted to watch the disease run its full course to death and then examine the bodies. When penicillin became the standard cure in the 1940s, the men were deliberately kept away from it. The study's staff intervened to stop them being treated elsewhere, including through the draft board. It was ended in 1972 only because a whistleblower went to the press. By the time of the apology, only eight of the men were still alive. Five were well enough to travel. Herman Shaw stood at the podium in the East Room, at ninety-four, and spoke. He said the wounds that were inflicted could never be undone, but that he was there in the hope that it would never happen again and that it could begin to heal. He had been a farmer his whole life. He had gone to the clinic because he was told he was being cared for. The President apologised and said what the government had done was shameful. That is the whole story. Forty years of being watched. Twenty-five more years of nothing. Then an hour in a nice room, and five old men, and the word sorry. The Tuskegee survivors deserved more than an apology—they deserved to have what was done to them remembered. We created an ebook to keep these histories from being buried again savvypurchase.samcart.com/pr…

Black jockeys won fifteen of the first twenty-eight Kentucky Derbies. By 1921 there were none. Not fewer — NONE. They were removed from the sport entirely and it took sixty-nine years before another Black jockey rode in the Derby. Isaac Murphy was the best of them. He was born enslaved in Kentucky. He won the Derby three times — the first jockey ever to do it and rode with a win rate he reported at around forty-four per cent, a figure no modern jockey approaches. As prize money and prestige grew, white jockeys organised to force Black riders out — boxing them in on the rail, refusing to ride against them, pressuring owners. Racing associations stopped licensing them. Within twenty years, an entire profession that Black men had dominated since before the Civil War was simply emptied. This is the pattern that repeats everywhere in this archive and almost nobody names it: Black excellence does not get pushed out of the poor jobs. It gets pushed out of the jobs that become lucrative. We must never forget our history