Throughout the history of the black health movement, black reformers
tried to secure social services for the rural poor by turning to the federal
government to circumvent the inequality of the Jim Crow South. They
viewed the acquisition of federal assistance as a political victory because it
was a way to bypass the restrictions of local white-only policies and states'
rights justifications for systematically denying social welfare funds to Afri-
can Americans. Yet, as the histories of the Tuskegee Movable School and the
Tuskegee Syphilis Study illustrate, government involvement proved to have
oppressive as well as progressive consequences for poor African Americans.

Black professionals risked little by linking their social welfare programs
to federal initiatives, as long as they maintained control over their own
agenda. For example, Booker T. Washington convinced the federal govern-
ment to incorporate the Tuskegee Movable School, a black rural develop-
ment program he directed, within the extension service work funded by the
U.S. Department of Agriculture. This action set a precedent for federal
government support to black farmworkers and marked the beginning of
organized black agricultural extension work in the United States. From
1906 to 1944 the Tuskegee Movable School provided adult education pro-
grams in agriculture, home economics, and health for rural African Ameri-
cans throughout Alabama. This traveling school became a model for the
creation of rural development programs in other states, such as Mississippi,
and even other countries, such as India. ¹

Black professionals counted on the benefits of government involve-
ment to outweigh the costs to the poor. In the case of the Tuskegee Movable
School they were undoubtedly right, but as the history of the Tuskegee
Syphilis Study shows, there were dire consequences when they were wrong.
From 1932 to 1972, white physicians of the United States Public Health

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