EXCLUSIVE | 'Organ Thieves' author Chip Jones recounts horrors of racism around South's first heart transplant
The current scenario unfolding in the US has brought to the forefront centuries of injustice that African-Americans have faced, and still continue to endure. The death of George Floyd sparked widespread protests across the nation against systemic racism and police brutality, while the Black Lives Matter movement reinvigorated their mission to elevate the status of the Black community. Almost every economic, social, and political aspect of life in this country is unequally distributed by race. Be it wealth or health care, there is an evident discrepancy in the system. Over the course of history, there have been umpteen number of heinous crimes committed against Black people that have either gone unnoticed or undocumented, which is an atrocity in itself.
Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist and author Chip Jones was serving as a director at the Richmond Academy of Medicine when he learned of the story of a man named Bruce Tucker. A Black factory worker, Tucker suffered a skull fracture and was rushed to the Medical College of Virginia, in May 1968. In less than 24 hours after his death, the MCV surgeons had transplanted Tucker's heart into the chest of a White businessman, without the knowledge of his family.
It was the first heart transplant in Virginia that also prompted America's first civil lawsuit for the wrongful death of this kind. Jones was shocked by the revelation and inspired to pen his fourth book centering on the racial biases against Black patients in 1960s America. Jones dug deep to present his investigative story on this medical tragedy and uncovered several undisclosed details. This formed the premise of his latest book 'Organ Thieves'.
He shines a light on some lesser-known but related incidents such as the 1994 discovery of skeletal remains from beneath the foundation of the Virginia Commonwealth University's Medical Center, which has links to the country's antebellum roots. Jones has nearly 30 years of journalistic reportage experience under his belt having worked with the Richmond Times-Dispatch, The Roanoke Times, and Virginia Business. MEA WorldWide (MEAWW) spoke with Jones about his 'Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South' which outlines the case of Bruce Tucker and other incidents injustice meted out to Blacks.
The heart transplant race was somewhat of a medical parallel to the space race in the sixties. "And the question was who was going to win it," says Jones. The author was a huge fan of Dr Christiaan Barnard, a South African heart surgeon well known for conducting the first human heart-to-heart transplant, who had studied in Virginia. But what he hadn't known was that the doctors who had trained Barnard had later conducted their own heart transplant, but there was very little mention of who had given up their heart.
In fact, the hospital hadn't divulged the donor's name until days later after Tucker's family, represented by renowned trial lawyer L Douglas Wilder, had filed a lawsuit over wrongful death. Jones had the opportunity to speak with Wilder, a real hero in his prime, who went on to become the first African-American governor in the US in the '80s. The author gained significant insights into the case and started building up the entire book from his 2017 interview with Wilder.
The next year and a half were spent on writing and researching for his book. "I turned the book around fairly quickly and it turns out the timing is fairly amazing, you know, with Black Lives Matter and everything," Jones added. The release of 'Organ Thieves' happens to come at a rather crucial point in our country's history as the Black Lives Matter movement continues to blow progressive winds of changes across the US. Jones is of a similar opinion, "I think it resonates today with the Black Lives Matter movement because this was a case where one Black life really didn't matter."
The movement has opened up discussions about so many things. Jones loosely quotes Dr Don Berwick, former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services from an article published for medical journal JAMA, saying "doctors and other healthcare providers need to think in terms of the moral determinants of health". That means one cannot be ignorant towards the things in society that are wrong and just observe on the sidelines, fixing people when they're broken. "You need to go upstream and see in effect, you know, who threw them into the river and why are they so broken," he adds.
He also draws focus to the Covid-19 crisis currently ravaging the nation. It is no secret that Black Americans and other communities of color have suffered greatly and disproportionately at the hands of this deadly disease. The likeliness of the distrust and suspicion they feel towards White doctors and medical professionals are also intensified tenfold. "I think it's brought out a lot of the ongoing suspicions of the healthcare system in the Black community in particular. These suspicions are long-standing," Jones concurs.
"I think what the medical community can do, and I've heard some discussion at the medical school around here, is we need to deal with these legacies. We need to deal with the pain. We need to deal with suspicion." In this context, he hopes his book can act as an educational tool to think about morality and the ethics of good medicine, for the average reader to know what happened in the past and what they should be doing in the present.
During the course of his research and investigation, Jones assumed two roles — one as a reporter, and another as a sympathizing person. While he was head deep in his investigation, he also had to take off his reporter's garb when he approached the Tucker family to find out more about the case that had him spending several sleepless nights. "You want to get the story, you want to get the facts, you're on deadline. You've got to say what you think happened. I had to take that off and see what the family wanted to talk about or not talk about," he says of the micro difficulties he faced in the process of writing his book.
Approaching Bruce Tucker's surviving son was a bit of a challenge because he didn't want to rehash any details about what had happened to his father. The biggest takeaway for Jones from this experience was to try being more sensitive. He faced several other roadblocks when trying to dig for more information. He was shocked to see that there were no legal transcripts of the trial and it turned out that in Virginia they could throw away transcripts when no one appealed a case.
"I had to really piece together the puzzle of this story using other sources, ones I never thought about like the judge's handwritten notes that I found at Washington Law School, 94 pages", he reveals. "I was very, very fortunate in talking to a couple of lawyers who were still alive, who were on the attorney general's team [during the trial]". He felt a real sense of responsibility in telling the story of Bruce Tucker because it really was a lost piece of history.
A prevalent reason for lingering suspicion in the system is due to the fact that people of color are not receiving equitable healthcare. He links this distrust to body-snatchers, controversial people that stole bodies from graves and sold it to medical colleges. Three chapters in 'Organ Thieves' delves into grave-robbing and how all the early American medical schools were based on stealing bodies. Jones had never known about this prior to his research, and it freaked him out. "The talk I'm hearing is that these injustices, the history, these ethics need to be part of a wider reform of the medical school curriculum," he adds.
Jones tells MEAWW about resident body snatcher or 'resurrectioner', Chris Baker, an African-American man who stole cadavers and supplied them to medical schools for their anatomy classes. Baker lived in the basement of the Medical College of Virginia until 1919. He was forced into the job as a descendant of enslaved African-Americans with no possibilities of a career choice.
The practice of grave-robbing was offensive to the religious beliefs of Black Americans, and Baker became a persona non grata among the more progressive Blacks during reconstruction. There was a significant amount of hatred thrown towards him in the Black community that he couldn't come out of during the day.
Jones also writes about the 1994 discovery of bones beneath the foundation of the Virginia Commonwealth University's Medical Center, while construction was underway. An untold number of bodies were dumped in what is known as a 'lime pit', once an old well, that was used at the early college of Virginia. Smithsonian forensic anthropologist, Doug Owsley, in his report from the site said they had excavated roughly 50 skeletal remains, which they believed belonged to enslaved Americans, both adults and children. These were probably bodies that were stolen and used in the early anatomy classes. Three days after the discovery, archaeologists got out as much as they could, and the construction resumed after they covered it all up. A community group is currently finding ways to honor these people who are still buried beneath the Medical Center.
"I just wanted to talk about how it shows the struggle for social justice played out at one particular place in time and how that struggle really is continuing today", Jones says in concluding thought. "I wanted to show really at the end of the day, every leader should see the importance of treating every human being, including themselves when they are in hospital, right," he adds. "We're the most vulnerable when we're in a hospital. Treat each other with compassion and equality and with dignity. That's my main message that every life really does count. If this book helps people to remind that, I will be joyful."
'Organ Thieves' will be available for purchase on August 18, and Jones hopes his readers will support and buy his latest work from an independent bookseller.