No, I didn’t realize that. I was led to believe that healthy black men were deliberately infected with syphilis, and that half were treated and half given a placebo (eventually dying horrible deaths).
Yes, even Mark Levin said this on his radio show of 5/5/08, but it's not true.
In 1932, the US Public Health Service started an important natural history study of late syphilis among sharecroppers in Alabama. Then, as now, the rates of STDs and particularly syphilis were very high among rural blacks in the American South.
The "treatment" for syphilis in 1932 was injectable arsphenamine (an organic salt of arsenic), and it was not clear whether or not the treatment was worse than the disease.
As with most PHS studies or grants, the effort also directed funds to places desired by the administration of the day, in this case rural clinics and black doctors, and thus accomplished a laudable secondary purpose.
As of WW II, the study was generating important, previously unknown data, about late complications of chronic syphilis infection and rates of progression in affected individuals.
The problem came after the introduction of penicillin into civilian life in 1946.
Penicillin cured syphilis, in all of its stages, with minimal risk of side effects or complications.
All of the men in the study should have been offered penicillin as soon as this became clear, certainly by 1950.
But, like any government program, there were many people being supported by study funds, and nobody accountable.
So the study continued, men got old and died, and nobody was treated until 1972.
How much racism had to do with Part I is debatable. Blacks in Alabama, in 1932, were where the syphilis was (rural blacks in the South today have extremely high rates of HIV/AIDS). Giving the affected men arsenic was not clearly what to do, in a disease which persisted for life with an unknown natural history. The funds, in the beginning, supported struggling black physicians and clinics, and this had something to do with the way the Roosevelt administration designed the study.
It was wrong - clearly, unequivocally wrong - not to treat the men when treatment was available. But that was after the study had been running for 18 years, and such lapses were common in medical research studies of the time which did not involve blacks.
So, in summary, nobody was deliberately infected, the enrollment of blacks in the beginning was incidental to the study design, and it's unclear how much racism, as opposed to poor research ethics, had to do with the 1950-1972 phase of the study.