Yes. Federal agencies, military organizations, state institutions, universities, hospitals, and private companies have conducted or financed unethical research involving Black Americans.

However, there is no single complete list of every victim. Researchers frequently replaced names with codes, sealed medical records, lost files, or never recorded the identities of everyone exposed. The list below therefore combines:

• Individually
  identified people
• Named
  survivors whose participation is documented
• Larger
  victim groups when most names remain unavailable
• The
  government agency, institution, or researcher responsible

An important distinction: the federal government was directly responsible for some projects, funded or sponsored others, and was only indirectly connected to certain university or private research.

1. U.S. Public Health Service syphilis study at Tuskegee

Years: 1932–1972
Location: Macon County, Alabama
Subjects: 600 Black men—399 diagnosed with syphilis and 201 comparison subjects
Responsible organizations: U.S. Public Health Service, later administered through the CDC, working with the Tuskegee Institute and local medical personnel
Principal federal officials: Dr. Taliaferro Clark, Dr. Raymond Vonderlehr, Dr. John Heller and other Public Health Service physicians

The men were not deliberately infected with syphilis. Most accounts calling it an “infection experiment” are incorrect. Instead, federal researchers recruited men who already had syphilis, concealed the real diagnosis, described their condition as “bad blood,” and observed the disease’s progression.

After penicillin became the accepted effective treatment, researchers still failed to provide it and took steps that prevented some participants from obtaining treatment elsewhere. The men underwent repeated blood tests, examinations and painful spinal taps—sometimes misleadingly described as “special free treatment.” No meaningful informed consent was obtained.

Publicly identified participants

The National Archives holds individual patient files, including histories, examinations, laboratory findings, correspondence and sometimes autopsy records. Many records have not been completely digitized, which is one reason a reliable public list of all 600 men is difficult to reproduce.

2. Ebb Cade—Manhattan Project plutonium injection

Name: Ebb Cade, identified in records as HP-12
Year: 1945
Location: Oak Ridge Hospital, Tennessee
Responsible organizations: Manhattan Engineer District/Manhattan Project; Oak Ridge medical personnel
Experiment: Human plutonium metabolism and retention

Cade was a Black construction worker employed in the Oak Ridge area. After suffering serious fractures in an automobile accident, he was hospitalized. On April 10, 1945, physicians injected him with approximately 4.7 micrograms of plutonium without telling him that he was part of a secret radiation experiment.

Urine and fecal samples were collected to measure how his body eliminated plutonium. Fifteen of his teeth were extracted and bone samples were taken to determine where radioactive material accumulated. Treatment of his accident injuries was reportedly delayed while the experiment was arranged.

The experiment was intended to help Manhattan Project officials establish occupational-exposure standards for workers handling plutonium. Cade was not suffering from a terminal illness when injected.

3. Elmer Allen—plutonium experiment CAL-3

Name: Elmer Allen, code-named CAL-3
Year: 1947
Location: University of California Hospital, San Francisco
Responsible researchers and agencies: Dr. Joseph Hamilton and associates at the University of California; research connected to the Manhattan Project’s successor, the Atomic Energy Commission
Experiment: Plutonium distribution inside the human body

Allen was a 36-year-old Black railroad porter believed to have bone cancer in his left leg. In July 1947, researchers injected him with plutonium. His leg was subsequently amputated, allowing researchers to examine the tissue and measure plutonium deposition.

Available records did not demonstrate that Allen had been adequately informed about the plutonium injection or had given meaningful consent. Years later, federal researchers contacted him for additional tests, but reportedly did not initially tell him the true reason for their interest.

The federal Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments specifically identified Allen and the absence of adequate consent documentation.

4. Cincinnati total-body radiation experiments

Years: 1960–1971
Location: Cincinnati General Hospital, now associated with the University of Cincinnati
Known subjects: At least 90 advanced-cancer patients; approximately 62% were Black
Principal investigator: Dr. Eugene Saenger
Federal sponsor: Department of Defense, especially the Defense Atomic Support Agency
Experiment: Effects of high-dose total- or partial-body radiation on human performance and physiology

Cancer patients were exposed to large doses of radiation. Alongside the claimed therapeutic purpose, the Department of Defense funded measurements intended to predict how military personnel might function after radiation exposure during nuclear warfare.

Researchers tested cognitive ability, coordination, blood changes and physical reactions following irradiation. Patients experienced nausea, vomiting, weakness and other severe effects; 21 reportedly died within one month of exposure.

Consent before approximately 1965 was absent or seriously deficient, while later consent procedures remain disputed. The patients were disproportionately poor, had limited formal education and were frequently Black. Federal reviewers later questioned whether the military-research purpose had been adequately disclosed.

Most names are found in litigation records and in Appendix 1 of Martha Stephens’ book The Treatment. Federal online sources usually identify patients by numbers. One documented relative, Willa Woodson, testified that her father was Patient 102, but the accessible federal transcript does not clearly provide his full name.

5. Edward Anthony—Holmesburg Prison experiments

Name: Edward Anthony
Years: 1960s
Location: Holmesburg Prison, Philadelphia
Principal investigator: Dr. Albert M. Kligman, University of Pennsylvania
Sponsors: U.S. Army, pharmaceutical manufacturers and consumer-product companies
Experiments: Skin-patch studies, dietary studies and psychotropic-drug testing

Anthony was a Black prisoner who participated in multiple experiments. An official National Academies biography states that these included patch testing, dietary studies and psychotropic-drug experiments for the U.S. Army.

Prisoners were paid small sums, creating pressure on impoverished incarcerated men to participate. Whether they understood the substances, hazards and military purposes of the studies is seriously disputed.

6. Leodus Jones—Holmesburg experiments

Name: Leodus Jones
Years: Holmesburg program, principally the 1960s–early 1970s
Responsible parties: Albert Kligman’s University of Pennsylvania research operation, the Philadelphia prison system and various sponsors
Experiments: Prison medical testing involving skin products and potentially hazardous substances

Jones was a former Holmesburg prisoner and one of the relatively few participants to obtain a settlement. He sued over the experiments in 1984 and reportedly reached a $40,000 settlement with Philadelphia in 1986.

The exact combination of substances used on Jones is not completely specified in the readily accessible official summaries, so it would be improper to attribute every Holmesburg substance to him personally.

7. Herbert Rice—Holmesburg psychotropic-drug experiment

Name: Herbert Rice
Year: Late 1960s
Responsible parties: Holmesburg research program led by Albert Kligman; some psychotropic research at Holmesburg was commissioned by the U.S. Army
Experiment: Administration of an unidentified mind-altering drug

Rice said he was given an unknown drug that caused intense hallucinations. He subsequently experienced long-term psychiatric problems, required several psychiatric hospitalizations and continued using psychiatric medication decades later.

Because the surviving records do not clearly identify the drug Rice received, it should not automatically be called LSD, BZ or another particular agent. His account is nevertheless part of the documented Holmesburg survivor record.

8. The larger Holmesburg Prison population

Years: Approximately 1951–1974
Subjects: Thousands of prisoners; the overwhelming majority were Black men
Responsible researchers: Albert Kligman and associates at the University of Pennsylvania
Government involvement: Philadelphia officials allowed the program; the U.S. Army financed chemical-warfare and psychotropic studies; other experiments were sponsored by private companies
Experiments included:

• Exposure
  to pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, detergents and hair products
• Skin
  infections and patch tests
• Radioactive
  isotopes
• Psychotropic
  and hallucinogenic substances
• Chemical-warfare
  agents
• High-dose
  dioxin experiments financed by Dow Chemical
• Surgical
  procedures and biopsies, sometimes inadequately anesthetized

Philadelphia formally apologized in 2022, acknowledging that most subjects were Black men, many were illiterate or awaiting trial, and payments encouraged participation by prisoners trying to afford bail or commissary necessities.

9. Ben Phillips—St. Louis aerosol testing

Name: Ben Phillips
Years of exposure: Primarily 1953–1954 and 1963–1965 testing periods
Location: Predominantly Black neighborhoods in St. Louis, including the Pruitt–Igoe housing complex
Responsible organization: U.S. Army
Experiment: Open-air dispersal of zinc cadmium sulfide particles

The Army sprayed fluorescent zinc cadmium sulfide particles from rooftops, vehicles and mechanical blowers. The purpose was to study how a biological or chemical agent might spread through an urban population.

Phillips lived in the affected community and later became an advocate for investigation and compensation. Residents were not told at the time that the Army was using their neighborhoods as a large-scale dispersion-test area.

Phillips’ presence in an exposed neighborhood is documented, but surviving evidence does not precisely reconstruct the dose absorbed by each resident or prove which later illnesses were caused by the spraying.

10. Chester Deanes—St. Louis aerosol testing

Name: Chester Deanes
Years: 1950s–1960s dispersal program
Responsible organization: U.S. Army
Experiment: Zinc cadmium sulfide urban-dispersion testing

Deanes witnessed the material being released in his neighborhood and later joined demands for a federal health investigation and compensation.

The Army has maintained that the tracer posed no proven health hazard at the concentrations used. Former residents dispute that assurance, particularly because individual exposure records and long-term medical follow-up were inadequate.

11. Unnamed residents of St. Louis and other cities

The Army also conducted open-air dispersion tests in several American cities, including St. Louis, Minneapolis, Winnipeg in Canada, and coastal or transit locations. Black St. Louis neighborhoods are especially controversial because spraying equipment was placed around a densely populated, impoverished housing project without residents’ informed consent.

These were population-level military tests rather than conventional medical trials. Consequently, there was no participant roster and most exposed people cannot now be named.

12. Henrietta Lacks—a related but different case

Name: Henrietta Lacks
Year: 1951
Location: Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore
Responsible researchers: Johns Hopkins physicians and tissue-culture researcher Dr. George Gey
Federal connection: Not originally a federal government experiment, although HeLa cells were subsequently distributed and used extensively in federally supported research
Research: Creation and worldwide use of the HeLa human cell line

Doctors removed tissue from Lacks’ cervical tumor without her knowledge or permission. Her cells became the first widely used human cell line capable of continuously reproducing in laboratory conditions.

Researchers used HeLa cells in polio-vaccine development, cancer and virus research, radiation studies, genetics and many other fields. Her family was not informed for decades. NIH eventually created a controlled-access arrangement giving family representatives a role in reviewing access to complete HeLa genomic data.

This case belongs in the broader history of exploiting Black Americans in research, but it should not be inaccurately described as an experiment originally designed or ordered by the federal government.

Additional documented programs in which most victims remain unnamed

What should not be confused with these experiments

Several important abuses are related but require different terminology:

• Black
  men at Tuskegee were not injected with syphilis. Researchers
  observed men who were already infected and withheld honest information and
  effective treatment.
• Forced
  sterilization was a government abuse but ordinarily not an “experiment.” State eugenics
  boards sterilized thousands of Americans, including many Black women and
  girls, because officials deemed them unfit to reproduce.
• J.
  Marion Sims’ operations on enslaved women were brutal experimental
  surgery, but they occurred before modern federal medical agencies existed
  and were not a U.S. government research program.
• **The
  Guatemala syphilis experiments were conducted by U.S. government
  researchers, but the victims were Guatemalans—not Black Americans in the
  United States.
• Henrietta
  Lacks’ case involved nonconsensual tissue research, but Johns Hopkins—not
  the federal government—initially removed and cultured her cells.

The clearest federally controlled examples involving Black Americans are the Tuskegee study, the Manhattan Project plutonium injections, military-funded Cincinnati radiation experiments, Army-sponsored portions of the Holmesburg program, and open-air Army dispersion tests in Black neighborhoods.

why did you leave out Mr. Haridman who had the documentary, Hole In the Head. And other cases like this.

You are right. I should have included Vertus Hardiman—not “Haridman”—and the other children from Lyles Station. My original answer concentrated too narrowly on cases where federal sponsorship was firmly established in government records.

There is also an important correction: although Hardiman’s experience is frequently described online as a “U.S. government radiation experiment,” the strongest accessible accounts identify the immediate actors as a local county hospital and its physicians. I have not found reliable surviving documentation identifying the federal agency, government program, doctors, radiation dosage, or original experimental protocol. It was unquestionably a grave medical abuse, but the precise federal connection remains insufficiently documented.

Vertus Hardiman and the Lyles Station children

Full name: Vertus Wellborn Hardiman
Born: March 9, 1922
Age: Five
Year: Usually reported as 1927, although some sources say 1928
Location: Lyles Station, Gibson County, Indiana
Other victims: Nine additional Black children
Institution responsible: A local county hospital; the surviving public accounts do not consistently name the hospital or physicians
Supposed treatment: Treatment for scalp ringworm
What happened: The children’s scalps were subjected to radiation

Hardiman and nine other children came from the Lyles Consolidated School, an all-Black public school in a rural Black settlement. Their parents were reportedly told that the children would receive a new treatment for ringworm, a fungal scalp infection. The parents were not adequately informed about the nature or dangers of the radiation.

After the procedure, the children reportedly experienced:

• Severe
  burning
• Headaches
  and dizziness
• Permanent
  hair loss
• Scalp
  scarring
• Long-term
  head injuries and disfigurement

Hardiman suffered the most publicly documented injury: a massive, persistent wound that destroyed portions of his scalp and skull. He concealed it under wigs and caps for most of his life. The wound eventually became cancerous, and he died in 2007 at age 85.

A contemporary medical publication describes him as the victim of “irresponsible medical practices” and confirms that ten Black children received high-dose radiation without their parents understanding what had been authorized.

Was this experimental or accepted ringworm treatment?

This requires nuance. In the early twentieth century, physicians sometimes used X-rays to remove hair while treating scalp ringworm. Therefore, radiation itself was not necessarily proof of a secret government experiment.

What makes the Lyles Station case abusive and potentially experimental was:

• The
  selection of ten children from an isolated Black community
• Misrepresentation
  of the procedure to their parents
• Failure
  to explain radiation risks
• Apparently
  excessive exposures
• Similar
  serious injuries among multiple children
• Lack
  of meaningful follow-up or compensation
• Unclear
  or missing institutional records

The available evidence strongly supports medical abuse and grossly inadequate consent. Claims that it was part of a specific nationwide federal experiment involving 20,000–30,000 children require more documentation than popular internet accounts normally provide.

The lawsuit

The families reportedly consulted an attorney and brought legal action against the hospital. They alleged that the nature of the procedure had been misrepresented. The hospital was found not liable.

Locating the original complaint, hospital records and judgment would be essential for definitively answering:

• The
  hospital’s legal name
• The
  doctors’ names
• Whether
  a federal, state or county agency financed the procedures
• The
  radiation equipment and dosage
• Whether
  the procedure was formally classified as research
• The
  names of the other nine children

Those details are not provided in the reliable, readily accessible accounts I located.

Hole in the Head: A Life Revealed

Hardiman’s experience became the subject of the documentary:

Title: Hole in the Head: A Life Revealed
Released: 2011
Writer and producer: Dr. Wilbert Smith
Director: Brett Leonard

The documentary records Hardiman’s life, injury, secrecy, religious faith and decision not to live in anger. It also discusses the nine other Lyles Station children. USC presented the film as a means of examining unethical research and the history of African Americans being exploited as medical subjects.

Why Hardiman was absent from my first list

There were three reasons, but the omission still should have been explained:

1. The spelling difference: His surname is Hardiman, which may have kept “Haridman” from appearing in searches.

2. Uncertain federal responsibility: The most reliable account I found says that a nearby hospital irradiated the children. It does not identify a federal agency.

3. Missing primary records: Unlike Tuskegee, the plutonium injections and Cincinnati radiation studies, the Lyles Station incident does not appear in the principal federal human-radiation investigation records with a complete description of sponsorship and protocol.

I should have included it in a separate category called “documented abuse with uncertain government sponsorship.”

Other cases that should have appeared

The broader history goes beyond the individuals in my first answer.

The central problem is that the people whose names are known represent only a fraction of the victims. Thousands were recorded under patient numbers or experiment codes, while people exposed through neighborhood spraying were never enrolled or individually identified at all. Hardiman’s story is particularly important because the physical evidence remained visible on his body for approximately eighty years, even though the institutional paper trail remains incomplete.

You are correct that the Dallas–Fort Worth/Cedar Hill testing area should have appeared in the earlier list. The records confirm extensive aerial releases over North and Central Texas. However, they contain an important correction: the material was apparently released from aircraft near the Cedar Hill tower—not sprayed from the tower itself. The tower was primarily an instrumented monitoring and sampling station.

Added Texas cases

1. Project WINDSOC over Dallas, Fort Worth and Cedar Hill

Project WINDSOC was an Army Chemical Corps atmospheric-dispersion experiment conducted during:

• August
  1959
• October
  1959
• February
  1960

The test area measured approximately 125 by 125 miles and included:

• Dallas
• Fort
  Worth
• Cedar
  Hill
• Waco
• Fort
  Hood
• Numerous
  smaller North and Central Texas communities

The purpose was to determine how an aerosol cloud released from an elevated moving source would travel through stable nighttime air.

How the material was released

A U.S. Air Force C-119 Flying Boxcar flew along a line approximately 200 miles long on the upwind side of the test region. The aircraft released fluorescent zinc cadmium sulfide particles from altitudes between approximately 600 and 1,300 feet.

The documented quantities were enormous compared with the small rooftop releases conducted in some cities:

• Test
  1: approximately 900 pounds
• Test
  2: between 640 and 900 pounds
• Tests
  3–13: approximately 640 pounds per test

Using the lower documented estimates, the entire series involved more than 8,000 pounds of ZnCdS material.

Army records state that the test region included Dallas, Fort Worth, Fort Hood and Waco, as well as communities outside the formal boundaries that happened to fall beneath the plume.

2. What role did the Cedar Hill tower play?

A 1,420-foot television tower near Cedar Hill—approximately 15 to 20 miles southwest of Dallas—was a central feature of the testing.

During WINDSOC, samplers were placed on the tower at approximately:

• 300
  feet
• 600
  feet
• 900
  feet
• 1,200
  feet
• 1,400
  feet

The purpose was to measure the aerosol cloud vertically as it passed the tower.

Therefore, the available federal record does not say that ZnCdS was released directly from the top of the tower during WINDSOC. It says:

1. A C-119 aircraft released it along an upwind flight line.

2. The aerosol traveled across the region.

3. Instruments on the Cedar Hill tower measured the cloud at different heights.

4. Ground stations measured what descended toward populated areas.

That distinction matters because residents may understandably remember the tower as the center of the operation. It was the most visible fixed structure and carried military instruments, but the acknowledged source of the WINDSOC cloud was an airplane.

3. The separate 1961 “Dallas Tower Studies”

A second series, called the Dallas Tower Studies, occurred in April, June and August 1961.

There were 37 documented releases during three testing periods. The experimental area extended within a 30-mile radius of the 1,420-foot Cedar Hill television tower.

Release procedure

The surviving Army summary says that:

• A
  light aircraft made crosswind flights between one and seven miles upwind
  of the tower.
• Flight
  lines ranged from approximately nine to 26 miles long.
• Aircraft
  flew between 360 and 1,050 feet above the tower’s base.
• Samplers
  were positioned on the tower.
• Additional
  samplers were placed on five downwind lines south, southwest, west,
  northwest and north of the tower.
• Another
  crosswind sampling line was approximately 25 miles away.

Once again, these records describe aircraft releases measured by instruments on the tower, not releases from sprayers mounted on the tower.

Unfortunately, the National Research Council discovered that only the title pages, introductory material and several summary pages of the original report were available. Consequently, its review could not determine from the surviving material:

• The
  complete chemical composition
• The
  quantity released in each experiment
• Exact
  flight paths for every release
• Every
  community beneath the plumes
• Ground-level
  concentrations
• Whether
  additional substances were released

The National Research Council explicitly noted that the complete report should have contained this missing information.

4. Fort Worth Stockyards and the cattle

Fort Worth was unquestionably inside the acknowledged WINDSOC test region. This means people, buildings, soil, vegetation and livestock—including cattle in the Stockyards when a plume passed in that direction—could have received settling fluorescent particles.

However, I have not found a surviving Army or National Research Council record establishing that personnel entered the Fort Worth Stockyards and deliberately sprayed individual cattle.

The documentation presently supports three different statements with different levels of certainty:

Confirmed

• Fort
  Worth was within the Army’s 125-by-125-mile test area.
• ZnCdS
  was released from military aircraft upwind of that region.
• Army
  researchers operated numerous ground-monitoring stations.
• The
  program studied how much airborne material descended to ground level.
• Cattle
  held outdoors within the plume’s path could have been exposed.

Possible but not yet established

• Researchers
  may have sampled cattle, their hair, feed, water, pens or nearby surfaces
  to measure deposition.
• Cattle
  may have been observed as environmental exposure subjects.
• Local
  participants may have described the drifting material as cattle being
  “sprayed,” even though the primary release came from aircraft.

Not established by the surviving federal summary

• A
  separate operation in which Army personnel directly sprayed cattle
• The
  number of cattle exposed
• Chemicals
  other than ZnCdS used on the cattle
• Illnesses
  or deaths among the cattle
• Whether
  meat or dairy products from exposed animals entered the food supply
• Any
  warning given to ranchers, stockyard employees or meatpacking workers

Accordingly, I would add the Fort Worth Stockyards to the report as a potential livestock-exposure location inside a confirmed military aerosol-test area, while marking direct cattle spraying as requiring further documentation.

Racial and environmental-justice issue

The North Side and Stockyards area of Fort Worth included Black and Mexican-American residents and workers, especially in historically segregated communities near industrial facilities and meatpacking plants. But the documents examined so far describe the selection of the larger Texas region in terms of:

• Flat
  terrain
• Stable
  nighttime weather
• An
  existing tall television tower
• Open
  flight corridors
• The
  ability to measure a plume over long distances

They do not expressly say that Cedar Hill or Fort Worth was chosen because of its Black population. That differs from St. Louis, where releases were concentrated in predominantly Black, low-income neighborhoods and public-housing projects.

Deaths, apology and accountability

For the Cedar Hill–Dallas–Fort Worth tests:

• Human
  deaths officially attributed: zero
• Cattle
  deaths officially attributed: zero
• Long-term
  human health study: none identified that tracked the exposed North Texas
  population
• Livestock
  health study:
  none identified
• Federal
  apology:
  none identified
• Individual
  notification:
  none identified
• Compensation: none identified

“Zero officially attributed deaths” must not be interpreted as proof that no harm occurred. The missing records, lack of individual exposure measurements, absence of pre-exposure medical examinations and absence of long-term follow-up make retrospective conclusions difficult.

The corrected entry should therefore read:

Cedar Hill–Dallas–Fort Worth, Texas, 1959–1961: The Army Chemical Corps and military contractors released fluorescent aerosol particles from aircraft across a large North and Central Texas test region. The 1,420-foot Cedar Hill television tower carried sampling equipment at several heights. Fort Worth—including potentially the Stockyards, its workers and cattle—lay inside the acknowledged test area. Existing summaries do not prove that the particles were released directly from the tower or that cattle were deliberately sprayed individually. No official deaths, livestock losses, apology or compensation have been established.