Alt

Marianne Babal

Sometimes when writing on a subject of history, you become totally immersed in the subject at hand — and don't even know when you accidentally touch the ALT   (as in alternate) key.

I recently wrote a historical feature extolling the accomplishments of two people from Wells Fargo's history, George S. Roberts and James A. Walker, both of whom trained and flew as combat pilots in the famed "Tuskegee Airmen"  squadrons in World War II. After retiring from distinguished military careers, both Roberts and Walker came to work for Wells Fargo as bankers. We at Wells Fargo Historical Services are very proud of their accomplishments and of their association with Wells Fargo.

I described the establishment of the U.S. Army Air Corps pilot training program at Tuskegee Institute  that the military had back in 1941 as an "experiment," testing whether African-Americans had the ability to perform as combat pilots — a reticence that indeed sounds ludicrous to us today. A reader pointed out to me that the word "experiment" in conjunction with Tuskegee has an alternate and more sinister connotation.

In 1972, a news reporter uncovered one of our country's most vile episodes of government-sanctioned racism — medical experiments carried out on unknowing African-American men with latent syphilis. The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, or formally the "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,"  commenced in 1932 and involved 600 male subjects. The U.S. Public Health Service's goal for the study was to track the natural progression of the disease in the subjects. Told only that they were being treated for "bad blood," the Black and mostly poor "patients" received no curative treatment, even after penicillin's introduction in the 1947 brought the first real cure for the disease. Test subjects were even discouraged from seeking other proven treatments. By the end of the experiment in 1972, 128 of the men had died from syphilis or related complications, and dozens of their wives and children had been infected as well.

My description of the military's training program at Tuskegee as the "Tuskegee Experiment"  touched a disturbing chord with some readers — even though the National Park Service , who now administers the historic airfield at Tuskegee Institute as the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site , uses the same terminology  in its exhibits and brochures.

Sometimes you can write history and not quite understand all its nuances or see it clearly it through a wide-angle lens.

Historians will occasionally write something about a person or place that contradicts family lore  or local tradition. When information that we believe is sound is refuted or rejected out of hand, we can be taken aback. The lesson learned is that we are not merely writing about a person, or a place, but someone else's life, someone else's experience. From time to time it does us good to be reminded that others may view the subject through a different lens. This writing assignment has reminded me once again that history is not just facts and context — it is indeed very personal.