NASW - National Association of Social Workers
09/17/2024 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 09/17/2024 10:56
Peter Buxtun posthumously receives National Association of Social Workers Foundation Knee/Wittman Outstanding Achievement Award
WASHINGTON, D.C. - The National Association of Social Workers Foundation (NASWF) is pleased to announce the late Peter Buxtun is the recipient of the 2024 Knee/Wittman Lifetime Achievement Award for being the whistleblower responsible for ending the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment in 1972.
The Knee/WittmanOutstanding Achievement Award is presented to a professional social worker who has made exemplary contributions in health and mental health policy.
Buxtun has received this honor posthumously. He died on May 18 at the age of 87. The NASW Foundation mourns his death death. Buxtun's actions demonstrate how brave social workers can be and their willingness to go against the tide to challenge injustices, especially when they are committed against the most vulnerable and oppressed people in our society.
The Public Health Service in 1965 hired Buxtun, then a 27-year-old Army trained psychiatric social worker and epidemiologist, to work as a venereal disease investigator. In the course of his duties Buxtun, who was born in Czechoslovakia, learned the agency since 1932 had been conducting an experiment on Black males in Tuskegee in Alabama's Macon County that examined the effects of untreated syphilis.
The treatment of these men was overtly racist. "I didn't want to believe it. This was the Public Health Service," Buxtun later said. "We didn't do things like that."
Buxtun filed complaints about the experiment in 1966 and again after the assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, but the agency said his concerns were irrelevant. In 1972, he leaked information on the experiment to Jean Heller of the Associated Press and the news appeared first in the Washington Star and then the next day in The New York Times.
Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy called for Congressional hearings and Buxtun and officials from the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare testified. Authorities stopped the experiment soon after.
Buxtun's whistleblowing led to new laws governing human research and medical ethics committees with non-physician members. President Bill Clinton in 1997 apologized for the U.S. government doing something so "morally wrong" and "clearly racist."
The men in the experiment, their partners, and their children or descendants still receive restitution payments from the Centers for Disease Control.
Buxtun exemplifies the NASW Code of Ethics, which calls on social workers to promote social justice and social change with and on the behalf of their clients. His bravery and tenacity have inspired social workers and will continue to do so for generations to come.
The Knee/WittmanOutstanding Achievement Award is presented to a professional social worker who has made exemplary contributions in health and mental health policy.
Buxtun has received this honor posthumously. He died on May 18 at the age of 87. The NASW Foundation mourns his death death. Buxtun's actions demonstrate how brave social workers can be and their willingness to go against the tide to challenge injustices, especially when they are committed against the most vulnerable and oppressed people in our society.
The Public Health Service in 1965 hired Buxtun, then a 27-year-old Army trained psychiatric social worker and epidemiologist, to work as a venereal disease investigator. In the course of his duties Buxtun, who was born in Czechoslovakia, learned the agency since 1932 had been conducting an experiment on Black males in Tuskegee in Alabama's Macon County that examined the effects of untreated syphilis.
The treatment of these men was overtly racist. "I didn't want to believe it. This was the Public Health Service," Buxtun later said. "We didn't do things like that."
Buxtun filed complaints about the experiment in 1966 and again after the assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, but the agency said his concerns were irrelevant. In 1972, he leaked information on the experiment to Jean Heller of the Associated Press and the news appeared first in the Washington Star and then the next day in The New York Times.
Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy called for Congressional hearings and Buxtun and officials from the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare testified. Authorities stopped the experiment soon after.
Buxtun's whistleblowing led to new laws governing human research and medical ethics committees with non-physician members. President Bill Clinton in 1997 apologized for the U.S. government doing something so "morally wrong" and "clearly racist."
The men in the experiment, their partners, and their children or descendants still receive restitution payments from the Centers for Disease Control.
Buxtun exemplifies the NASW Code of Ethics, which calls on social workers to promote social justice and social change with and on the behalf of their clients. His bravery and tenacity have inspired social workers and will continue to do so for generations to come.