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In Rebecca Skloot’s book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” she tells how Johns Hopkins Hospital was established at the direction of Johns Hopkins, a white man born on his father’s tobacco plantation. His father freed his slaves before the Emancipation Proclamation, and Hopkins, the son, went on to become a wealthy man as a banker and grocer, and by selling his own brand of whiskey, Skloot writes.
The younger Hopkins never married, and had no children, but did not like it that the poor and indigent could not get medical care, and so he formed a board and donated $7 million to be used to build a medical school and a hospital which would give care to these unfortunate souls. He specifically said that the hospital should give care “to the poor of the city and the state, of all races, who are stricken down by any casualty.” (Skloot, p. 167)
He also set aside some $2 million worth of property and $20,000 annually which he said should be used for helping black children.
That did not help black people, however, lose their fear and distrust of white doctors and the white medical establishment. It was in Johns Hopkins Hospital that Henrietta Lacks was treated for cervical cancer, and it was a doctor from that hospital that took specimens of her cells without her knowledge.
So, when Skloot wanted to talk to Deborah Lacks, Henrietta’s daughter, she had to get through Lacks’ distrust of the white medical establishment. Lacks and so many blacks recoiled at the thought of being treated by white doctors. After all, there had been the Tuskegee Experiment and … the night doctors.
Gladys Marie Fry writes in “Night Riders in Black Folk History” that during and after slavery, the ways that white slave holders, overseers and others controlled black people was by encouraging and exploiting a fear of the supernatural. They would plant rumors of ghosts and spirits that patrolled at night, and “night doctors,” who existed only to steal black people, and take them away, never to be seen again. Some whites even masqueraded as ghosts themselves, wearing white robes and hoods, which later became the garb of the Ku Klux Klan. The purpose of the night riders, which included the night doctors, was to manipulate black people and keep them under the control of the white power structure, dissuading them from trying to escape and thus upset the source of their economic prosperity. Skloot writes that slave owners actually told their slaves of “gruesome research done on black bodies,” and told them that the night doctors were always “out there” to find unfortunate black people in which to inject some deadly disease or to, worse, steal them for research. |
