Miss Evers Boys The Tuskegee experiment often receives special attention in textbooks about ethics. In the case of Miss Evers' Boys, the experiment became a critically acclaimed television movie starring Laurence Fishburne and Alfre Woodard. Although some of the details were changed to make the subject amenable for a screenplay, Miss Evers' Boys is based on the Tuskegee experiments, in which researchers were authorized to study African-Americans with syphilis while purposely withholding treatment.

The film fills in the details that the textbooks usually omit. These details include the psychological suffering, the human perspective that is impossible to imagine otherwise. There is a personal dimension displayed in Miss Evers' Boys that cannot be captured in a dry, objective textbook or academic article. Although it is difficult to watch due to the heavy subject matter, Miss Evers' Boys is a mandatory accompaniment to formal study on the subject of ethics in research design.

The Tuskegee experiment lasted for decades, showing how ingrained racism is and has been in American culture. Only because African-Americans, and especially poor African-Americans, were the subjects, was it possible to carry out the experiments. In the film, Alfre Woodward plays Eunice Evers, the title character. Evers is a nurse who is finally able to achieve a modicum of justice for the victims of the horrible experiments. Miss Evers' Boys is told primarily from her perspective, but while she is telling her story,...

Until the early 1970s, there were few constraints on scientific researchers. This was especially true in emerging fields such as social psychology and psychology, but as this film shows, medical research also had few ethical rules. According to the film, the experiment was not intended to directly harm the inflicted men. Men inflicted with syphilis in the African-American community were to be treated and studied to reveal the effects of the disease and any intervention. However, when funding for the research dried up, there was no interest in providing the men with relief.
The film shows that people who are politically disenfranchised and underprivileged do not enjoy the same rights and freedoms as those in power. A situation like that depicted in the film would never have occurred in a prestigious community. Among poor blacks in Macon County, Alabama, though, such an experiment was likely and possible. The subjects in the research were viewed as lab rats, rather than as full human beings. Miss Evers' Boys is a film that is as much about racism as it is about medical ethics. The film raises important questions about how the nation failed to eliminate racist social, political, and economic institutions after the Civil War. African-Americans could not be legally owned as slaves, but…