15 of America's Worst April Fools' Jokes Played on Black Folks

In 1932, 600 Black sharecroppers were enrolled into a study by the doctors at US Public Health Service who were looking for a cure for syphilis. However, the volunteers were misled into believing they’d receive free medical care in exchange for handing over their bodies for science and were also told they were being treated for “bad blood,” per Tuskegee University.

Of the group, 399 men had latent syphilis and the control group of 201 did not. However, for the duration of the study, none of the men with syphilis were given any treatment for their illness. Even when penicillin was approved in 1947, the researchers didn’t offer it to the participants. The doctors literally played in their faces, watching the progression of the disease take over, causing the men to die, go blind, lose their minds or undergo other long-term health issues.

The experiment was shut down by the 1960s after PHS investigator Peter Buxton exposed that 28 people died from the disease, 100 died from complications related to the disease, 40 spouses had been infected with it and 19 children inherited the disease from birth as a result of the scheme.

Following the Civil War, in acknowledgement of the economic barriers for Black people coming out of enslavement, Union General William T. Sherman asked Black leaders what they wanted after gaining their freedom. He then agreed to provide 40 acres and one mule to each family of the formerly enslaved population by divvying up the plantations they worked on.

However, after President Abraham Lincoln died, the newly elected Andrew Johnson rolled back the reparations agreement, forcing Black people to work again on white-owned land, as previously reported by The Root. No one ever revisited that promise.

In 1951, Lacks was diagnosed with cervical cancer at John Hopkins - the only big hospital at the time that took Black patients. While being treated, doctors took samples of her DNA and discovered the HeLa “immortal” cell line - the first cell that could duplicate itself over and over. 

However, her family speculated that the doctors spent more time poking and prodding at her body for samples than actually treating her. Lacks died in the hospital the same year. In Rebecca Skloot’s “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” she noted the details from a lab assistant who viewed Lacks’ body and recalled her organs being riddled with tumors.

Lacks is the reason why we have most of our vaccines and medical treatments for everything from polio to COVID-19 vaccines. Her family didn’t know about the research until 25 years after Lacks died, according to Skloot’s book.

The first state to issue “Black Codes” into the legislature following the Emancipation was Mississippi in 1865. This law pretty much said Black people’s freedom was acknowledged if and only if they had paperwork proving they had a job. If not, they would be arrested or more often than not, sent right back to a plantation to be enslaved all over again.

That wasn’t all. The law also forbade Black people to serve as witnesses against white people in court, only allowed Black people to marry within their race and restricted their ability to own property outside of towns and cities. Freedom where?!

Another catch to being a “free” Black person and naturalized citizen of the United States was having to know where to go and where not to go. Sundown Towns were essentially whites-only death traps across the South for Black people.

If you worked in the town, you had to leave by sundown. If you were driving through at night, hold your bladder until the next safe area. Luckily, Victor H. Green came along between 1936 and 1964 to publish Negro Travelers’ Green Books to guide Black folks to areas safe from segregation and racist violence, per The National Park Service.

Considering the medical field is inherently tailored to white men, a number of false narratives about Black patients emerged causing inaccurate diagnoses and sometimes, treatment. A 2020 article published in the National Library of Medicine found treatments for all patients are based on the treatments for a “default human” -- that human being a white male.

Other notable myths include Black people having a higher pain tolerance, significant vitamin D deficiencies and other stereotypes that cause Black to receive biased assessments, per Medical News Today. Though science and research have debunked these myths... said myths are still being taught to our doctors who gaslight us into thinking our pain is at a 1 and not a 10.

Who decided that pin-straight hair and fair skin was the standard? THEE biggest joke about beauty standards was conditioning Black people through magazines and advertisements that white was right.

Even our own cultural evolution of style was impacted by chemicals to straighten our hair or wigs whereas afros symbolized a sense of power and Black pride. Thank God we never lost our sense for color, pattern and creativity in fashion. Now, the “standard” wants to look like us.

Let’s take a few steps back from the whole “white rappers” debate. Let’s take this back to the birth of rock music, blues and jazz. America’s prank on Black folks was thinking they could take our sound and claim it as their own.

We could go down the line of examples from Elvis Presley who swiped the sounds of southern Black blues and gospel or Bobby Caldwell who swiped the soul sound of your average Motown group, via The Guardian. The trend of music appropriation has since continued as we watch some white artists put on our voice and clothes in an effort to be like us while not acknowledging where they got their swag from.

With President Abraham Lincoln’s strike of his pen, all slaves were freed in the land after the announcement of the 1863 proclamation. SIKE!

This didn’t go into effect everywhere. Slavery was still legal in Union-controlled areas within the Confederacy. In fact, many enslaved people were hidden from the news of the proclamation by their owners, not knowing they were free to go. If they ever did find out, some of them were killed before they got a chance to embark on their new life.

Well, eventually, an amendment was made to make slavery illegal altogether but it snuck in a loophole at the end to still allow it in a more sophisticated manner. The amendment states that slavery is illegal except as a criminal punishment. Therefore, if you are criminally convicted, you can be subject to unpaid labor and horrifying conditions.

During the 1890s until the passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Black people faced a slew of obstacles to casting their ballot in a constant cycle of “You can vote but...”

Poll taxes, literary tests, disenfranchisement clauses, grandfather clauses and all-white primaries were used as tools to make voting more difficult for Black people for no other reason than their race. If it wasn’t discriminatory legislation, it was water hoses and attack dogs keeping us from the vote.

The next bit of foolishness pulled on Black people is clean water deprivation. According to researchers at the Silent Spring Institute, one-third of Americans have been exposed to unregulated contaminants in the water running through their homes, majority of which are Black and Hispanic.

The main harrowing example of this is the Flint, Michigan water crisis when the majority Black area bore the brunt of a cost-cutting decision resulting in lead-filled water to flow through their homes. The ordeal lasted five years.

Ugh, gosh. For decades we’ve been spoon-fed under-analyzed statistics on the number of murders Black people commit in relation to the 15 percent of the U.S. population we take up. Trump and many of his conservative followers try to fool the public into believing that Black people are more violent and prone to criminal behavior than anyone else. They must have forgotten slavery and the riot-spree burning through Black-owned towns.

The war on drugs between the 1960s and 1990s was by far one of the most evil stunts targeted at the Black community by white politicians. The crack epidemic, in particular, was plastered through the media and politics as a Black issue. As a result, Black people were incarcerated eight times more than white people, who actually were using the drug more than Black people, according to The National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Not to mention, Black people got higher sentences and faced the good ol’ mandatory minimums more than white people, which further rigged the statistics to show a false narrative that Black people have more criminal tendencies.

The centuries of slavery that resulted in the murder, rape and physical and psychological torture of Black people is hard to teach to a class of young minds but Republican leaders all over the country are encouraging the absence of it being taught at all.

If that’s not the case, then some political figures such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Bill O’Reilly suggested Black people benefited from slavery in some ways like having the bare minimum access to food and shelter or learning sharecropping skills. Lying about the reality of slavery only makes its impact on Black American socioeconomics easier to blow off.