'Lovecraft Country' Episode 3: The real story of how White doctors experimented on Black slaves in the mid-90s
Spoilers for 'Lovecraft Country' Episode 3
In Episode 3 of HBO's 'Lovecraft Country', we see Miss Letitia "f**kin" Lewis (Jurnee Smollett) take on horrors beyond the realm of the supernatural. The episode titled 'Holy Ghost' see Letitia buy a manor in a White neighborhood and face their wrath in the form of vehement harassment. From placing a fire-lit cross in their yard to the police arresting her and assaulting her in the van, Let''s ordeal is straight out of pages of a nightmare one would never want to visit.
Later in the episode, she also finds out the manor she's bought used to be the site of a White doctor experimenting on Black people — mostly his slaves. And terrifying as watching all of that unfold on screen might be, Letitia's horrors are not something unfathomable. In fact, it was the reality in our world less than a century ago.
The harrowing story of the doctor is borrowed from the true story of the 40-year long Tuskegee study where the Department of Health's Public Health Service used hundreds of Black men in Alabama who had been diagnosed with syphilis as test subjects in 1932. The subjects were never informed of the disease and just told they had "bad blood". Later, when antibiotics were developed for the cure, the subjects were still given none to map the progression of their illness.
Similarly, later, when Leti decides an exorcism might help her manor haunted by the evil doctor's spirit and those he had experimented upon, she takes the names of actual enslaved victims of J Marion Sims. Lucy and Anarcha were two of the many Black women who were mercilessly killed in the 1840s in the process of Simms experimenting to master a method for repairing vaginal tears. The two women were reportedly subjected to multiple surgeries without any anesthesia before Simms perfected the procedure and began attempting it on White women.
Again in the show, set in the Jim Crows segregation era, when Letitia buys the house, her sister Ruby warns her, "Just last year there was almost a riot across town because a Negro couple tried to move into an all-White building." This is also borrowed from the true story of the White Illinoisians who had blatantly protested against house integration. This happened in July 1951, when Harvey and Johnetta Clark moved into a Chicago apartment with their two children and were harassed from the start.
In the beginning, it was the sheriff preventing them to do so. But they didn't listen and as they began moving, on July 11, a mob of 4000 White people gathered and stormed their house. The mob threw out the Clarks' sofa and their daughter's piano, firebombed the building and left the family, along with several other White people living in the building, homeless. None of the rioters were charged, only the building's owner and broker were booked for inciting a riot by renting to Black people.
We see something similar in Leti's story when White people place a fire-lit cross on her new yard while all the Black people invited to her housewarming party were gathered inside. They also place bricks against their car horns for incessant noise, and when Leti finally retaliates to that by smashing the car windows, she is arrested and assaulted in the van, tossed around against the vehicle's walls by intentional jagged jerks.
'Lovecraft Country' airs on Sundays at 9pm on HBO.
