 No, the U.S. government did not allow hundreds of black men to go untreated for syphilis. If you read that, you would think that they happen to have syphilis. And the U.S. government just said, yeah, we ain't going to do nothing. And then when you go on further, it says this. Forty years early in 1932, federal scientists began studying 400 black men in Tuskegee, Alabama, who were infected with syphilis.