Clinton to issue Tuskegee apology

'Treated us like guinea pigs'

But the men were never told they had syphilis. They were told they had "bad blood" and were denied access to treatment, even for years after penicillin came into use in 1947.

By the time the study was exposed in 1972, 28 men had died of syphilis, 100 others were dead of related complications, at least 40 wives had been infected and 19 children had contracted the disease at birth.

Few survivors now

Only a handful of the Tuskegee experiment men are still alive.

Clinton will tell Shaw, Carter Howard, 93; Charlie Pollard, 91; and Fred Simmons, 100, that the United States is officially sorry that it let them suffer so unfairly for so long during the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.

It was an apology that Simmons was anxious to accept. It helped make up for years of discomfort -- and that scary month almost 50 years ago when he was bleeding from sores, unable to walk or eat and nearly dead from starvation.

"I'm going to go up there, shake the president's hand and tell him I'm doing all right," Simmons said as he left for Washington on Thursday.

"They thought he was going to die, but then one day he started getting better," said Simmons' grandson, Michael Simmons. "There was never any cure. We just prayed a lot. That worked better than anything."

Other survivors and their families, unable to make the trip, will watch via satellite from the campus of Tuskegee University. The historically black college, then known as Tuskegee Institute, did not take part in the syphilis study, a point Clinton intends to underscore on Friday.

Encouraging black medical careers

Clinton also was launching an effort on Friday to encourage more blacks to pursue careers in bioethics and medical research, as a step toward ensuring that an episode like the 1930s-era experiments never happens again.

The president will pledge $200,000 in funding for building a Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care at Tuskegee University, said a White House official.

Also, the official said, Clinton would announce the creation of bioethics fellowships for minority students, offered by the Department of Health and Human Services.

A career defending civil rights

Gray, an Alabaman who received his legal schooling out of state, decided to return, "pass the bar and destroy everything segregated I could find".

His career in civil rights law began in the mid 1950s. He represented and was a friend to Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1955 Montgomery bus protests.

Gray also filed injunctions to allow freedom marches and opened the legal doors to allow African-Americans into the University of Alabama and at Auburn University.