Miss Evers' Boys - My Reflection

Having never heard of the play Miss Evers’ Boys, I was very anxious to see what it was about. I barely knew the basic story – the play was based on the United States Public Health Service’s “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” – but what I didn’t know was how race really tied into everything.

Throughout the play, Miss Evers’ (Mary Miller) has a brief monologue, giving the background and context of what is happening in the story. We meet four men – Willie Johnson (Stanley A. Jackson, III), Caleb Humphries (Jeff Kirkman, III), Hodman Bryan (Edwin Brown, III), and Ben Washington (Adarius Smith). These men are quarantined in an old school house when they meet Nurse Evers, a black nurse that has been sent by doctors at Tuskegee who decided to conduct a study on men with Syphilis. The men were persuaded into participating in the study because they were offered fifty dollars towards burial expenses when they died. They received arsenic shots and mercury back rubs for months, but once the funds ran low, Dr. Eugene Brodus (Henian Boone) and Dr. John Douglas (Eric Humphries) told Miss Evers that they had come up with a new study to test on the men. Dr. Douglas believed that if they created a study that showed the affect of untreated Syphilis on black males, they government would give them funds and it would encourage more money flow. Miss Evers reluctantly agrees, as she was promised that these four men would be the first to get treatment after the test, not completely understanding the dire consequences that lay ahead. Even after the cure, Penicillin, is discovered, Miss Evers is forced not to tell the men about it, for the Doctors must finished up the fourteen year study and have accurate results.

Seeing the story come to life was a fantastic way for me to understand the pain that the four men and Miss Evers went through. Being able to watch the story be acted out helped me see how influential race was, though it seemed not be strongly emphasized until towards the end of the story. What I found interesting was the fact that in order to get any kind of attention from the U.S. government or Public Health Service, these four black men had to suffer through this disease for years. I kept thinking about the fact that if these were four white men, they would have been treated first after the study was conducted, like the black men were promised. This is just another piece of evidence that proves that blacks were seen as inferior beings that did not receive proper treatment, medically or otherwise. After seeing this play, I have realized that it is my responsibility as a person of this current generation to make people aware of the injustices that went on, especially in the medical field that no one seemed to want to stop. I encourage all who haven’t seen the play yet to go see it to not only support our fellow Bison, but to learn more about our history as African Americans in this country.