Essay On Fannie Lou Hamer

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Flash forward to 1961 the youngest of 19 children, Fannie Lou Hamer was intelligent, happy, and loved to read however being dark-skinned, uneducated, and a female, life was not the easiest for her. Fannie went to the hospital to have a tumor removed from her stomach she later found out that the surgeon not only removed the tumor he removed all of her internal reproductive organs, sterilizing her. Unfortunately, there was no way to file a lawsuit again because of her sex and decent no one would help her. (Washington 189-191) Horrible occurrences like this happened all the time, a racist doctor who wanted to help curve the African population in the world would take advantage of his patients and do what he felt needed to be done. Not only did “accidental” sterilizations occur often but also other organs or tissue and medical procedures would be performed on innocent Africans who went seeking help from the medical profession and were horribly treated and misused in the name of science. In1977, Casper Yeagin, a sixty-eight-year-old retired mechanic disappeared. His daughter filed a missing persons report and after months of worrying and multiple errors on the police’s part Casper’s body was found on a slab at Howard University medical school waiting to be used for practice by medical students. (Washington 115-117) No one had seen anything wrong with finding a dead African American on the street and after the body had not been claimed (in less time than is normally given) so the body was sent to the Medical school to be used for research. The fact is that most of the bodies donated from the medical examiners office were of African decent, while the unclaimed Caucasian bodies were left to wait for just a bit longer to see if someone wo... ... middle of paper ... ...shington 271-279) Everything about this test was wrong from luring the parents and children with brides to down playing the severity of the tests to be administered just another way African Americans were targeted for medical research and not given the true facts. “Black Intellectual and biological Inferiority has been an incorrect assumption in Western scientific and lay culture for more that a thousand years.” (Byrd 8) Since the beginning of our great country there has been nothing but pain and hardship put on the African American population, whether it be slavery or this horrible practice of medical experimentation. The fact that these experiments and deceptions from the medical community have continued all the way to 1997 and beyond is appalling and show that even to our present day like the medical community does not African Americans and equal to other races.

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