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A late, but not too late, apology for the shameful use of Black bodies

Decades after a Black man's heart was used in a transplant without his family's consent, Virginia lawmakers express "profound regret." That matters.

By Theresa Vargas | 2024-03-13

Bruce Tucker's grave. (Family photo)

When Gayle Turner testified before Virginia lawmakers, she knew they had previously failed to pass a resolution that offered an apology for the unethical use of Black bodies by medical institutions. This year, when the resolution appeared in front of lawmakers again, she hoped to compel them to act.

She told them her family appreciated the effort to "recognize, realize and apologize for past wrongs to assure they never happen again."

She told them Virginia had an opportunity to "lead the nation in truth telling and addressing racial inequalities in health care."

She told them that the man who inspired the resolution, her cousin Bruce Tucker, was a responsible father, a loyal employee, a good citizen -- and a victim.

"Bruce Tucker was the victim of a racist system that devalued his life and did not acknowledge him as humankind and therefore did not treat him that way," Turner testified. "It was the total disregard of Bruce as a human being that benefited science, mankind and made immeasurable profits for the Medical College of Virginia."

Fifty-six years ago, Bruce Tucker's heart helped Virginia make history. After the 54-year-old was taken to a hospital with a head injury, a medical team removed his heart and used it in the first transplant of that kind in the South. Afterward, the surgeons who performed the procedure were celebrated and immortalized. Their names appeared outside that hospital building on a plaque under the words "Birthplace of cardiac transplantation."

But in recent years, a fuller story of how that transplant came to take place has emerged, and it shows this: surgeons taking a Black laborer's heart without his family's consent and placing it in a White businessman. That fuller story -- which I shared with you in an earlier column -- was of his family learning from a mortician, not doctors, that he was missing his heart and kidneys. Relatives still have questions about what happened in the hospital between the time Tucker arrived able to talk and when the surgery took place less than a day later. The family lost a lawsuit in 1972 in which attorneys argued over whether Tucker should have been declared dead. A medical examiner performed a test that found he had no brain activity, but the legal definition of brain death did not yet exist.

What happened to Tucker is both shocking and not surprising when we reflect on the many ways Black, Brown and Indigenous bodies have been historically experimented on in the name of scientific and medical advancements. There are plenty of egregious examples.

Consider the Tuskegee experiment, in which the government spent decades studying how syphilis ravaged the bodies of Black men without their informed consent and withheld treatment even after one became widely available. Consider also Henrietta Lacks's "immortal" cells, which were taken from the Baltimore mother of five when she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Her extraordinary cells led to significant scientific discoveries and brought in profits for companies -- all while her descendants were left unknowing and uncompensated.

Tucker's experience is part of that side of history, the one that is hard to own. That's what makes what Virginia lawmakers did recently worth noting. They owned it. The state Senate and House unanimously passed the resolution, which acknowledges "with profound regret the unethical use of Black bodies by medical institutions in the Commonwealth."

That legislative action did not garner much public attention, but it matters. It matters to Tucker's family, and it matters to others who understand how past wrongs can bleed into modern-day practices.

After learning about what happened to Tucker, Phillip Thompson, an attorney and former president of the Loudoun County NAACP, brought the issue to the attention of state Sen. Jennifer B. Boysko (D-Fairfax). She introduced the resolution last year, but the Republican-led House Rules Committee tabled it, keeping it from advancing. The reason one member gave: There were too many regrettable stories, and he worried there would be no end to these resolutions.

Thompson described the recent passage of the resolution as an important "first step in addressing health-care disparities."

He said Tucker's story felt personal to him -- not only because it happened in his lifetime but also because his family has been on both sides of the transplant process. His son is a recipient of organ donation, and Thompson's family decided to donate his late granddaughter's organs in hopes of saving others. Thompson told me he has seen how "residual fear" has left many African Americans hesitant to sign up to be organ donors.

"If you ask African Americans, 'Why don't you sign a donor card?' that's going to come up: 'I don't want to go in and have them pull the plug on me in order to use my organs,'" Thompson said. "You're not just talking about something in the past. You're talking about the impact it's having right now, today, on what could be lifesaving things."

Boysko, in a statement she sent to me, described the resolution as "an effort to promote reconciliation with the intent to stop further harm."

The resolution acknowledges not only what happened to Tucker but also other acts committed through the Medical College of Virginia. It notes how practitioners in need of cadavers employed grave robbers to dig up bodies in Black cemeteries, and how an examination of human remains that were discovered during an excavation revealed most were of African descent, and at least nine were children.

Boysko said she and Thompson worked together on the effort and then "sat in shock and anger" when the House Rules Committee refused to pass it. She noted that new leadership is now in place. Del. Don L. Scott Jr. (D-Portsmouth) is the first African American to serve as House Speaker.

"This year, the family of Bruce Tucker was treated with the dignity and respect they deserved and they were able to share his story and accept our apology," Boysko said. "Apologies matter."

She's right. They do. They matter on an individual level, and they matter on a societal level, especially when that society has seen repeatedly how a mistrust of medical systems leads to avoided appointments, missed diagnoses and premature deaths.

Virginia Commonwealth University, which oversees the hospital system that was once known as the Medical College of Virginia, where Tucker ended up on May 24, 1968, issued an apology to Tucker's family after former Richmond journalist Chip Jones wrote a book about the transplant titled "The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South." But the apology felt disingenuous to Tucker's family members, who learned about it through news accounts, and Turner has since called on university officials to take actions that would go toward recognizing her cousin's contribution and addressing racial inequities in the medical field.

When I spoke to Turner recently, she said she has been encouraged by her conversations with university officials. She also described the apology from state lawmakers as "shedding a light where none had been shed before" and expressed hope that it would go toward "building trust and better outcomes."

The apology may have been overdue, but it did not come too late, she said: "It's never too late to do what's right."


This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/03/13/virginia-apology-black-bodies-bruce-tucker/


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