When the coronavirus stopped the world from spinning, my fraternity brothers and I did what many

people did to break the social isolation of home confinement.

We began meeting over Zoom.

Our conversations ranged from the serious to the silly.

We encouraged each other to be safe, to mask up, and ribbed each other for the hilarious

ways we chose to stay busy.

We were grateful for this little bit of escapism.

And we were all excited when the COVID-19 vaccine was approved.

But not everyone was eager to get the shot. Vaccine hesitancy among my frat brothers,

all college-educated black men, was real. Like others in the African American community,

their caution was not irrational.

It was not rooted in the fictitious belief that the virus wasn't real, a fantasy that continues

to fuel vaccine refusal among politically conservative whites.

It was rooted instead in historical reality. African Americans have long suffered from medical races.

Stories of abuse from the Jim Crow era circulate widely within the black community.

Several of my fraternity brothers who said they did not trust the federal government

pointed to the Tuskegee experiment.

For several decades starting in the 1930s, federal to the Tuskegee experiment. For several decades, starting in the 1930s,

federal officials in Tuskegee, Alabama, withheld penicillin from black men suffering from syphilis

so that they could measure the effects of the disease. Other brothers mentioned Henrietta Lax,

who while a patient seeking treatment for cancer at Johns Hopkins,

had cells harvested from her body without her permission, cells that continue to replicate

...