"Thanks to the persistence of reporter Eileen Wellsome of The Albuquerque Tribune, whose special report last November titled "The Plutonium Experiment" cracked open a decades long scandal of radiation experiments on unsuspecting citizens throughout the country, we are now seeing evidence of the atomic age horrors that so many in the scientific community and government knew but kept silent about. It is a collection of U.S. government sponsored guinea pig experiments. But there is also another sad fact: The experiments reveal a disturbingly large involvement of people of color, especially African-Americans.
Though it is clear that other reports of radiation tests on civilians--mainly poor, disadvantaged, or mentally impaired--during the Cold War were not limited to blacks only, they do show a continuing legacy of medical science using unsuspecting African Americans. There is little or no informed consent involved. This is nothing new as all African-Americans share a common medical/scientific history: Black lives are easily expendable. Thus it is no surprise that this bitter legacy has found renewal with the recent revelations of the Cold War radiation experiments.
E. Cooper Brown, Director of the National Committee of Radiation Victims, says, "It is my guess that all those experimented on with radiation will turn up to be at least 60 per cent people of color, with a large portion being African Americans." If this is indeed true, then African Americans will be part of yet another medical/scientific nightmare comparable to--and even surpassing--the Tuskegee experiments."