Shiloh Church and the Tuskegee Study

This quiet country church near Notasulga holds one of the heaviest stories in American medicine. Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church and its school sat at the center of the United States Public Health Service study of untreated syphilis in Black men, carried out in Macon County from nineteen thirty-two to nineteen seventy-two. The men in the study were never told they had the disease and were deliberately left untreated, even after penicillin became a cure.

Many gathered under a tree here at Shiloh to wait for the study nurse, who would check on them or carry them to Tuskegee. Some of those men are buried in the church cemetery, where the oldest marked grave dates to eighteen eighty-one. The church and its adjoining Rosenwald school, built with support from Booker T.

Washington and Julius Rosenwald, are now preserved as a State of Alabama Historic Site.