A black man approached me on Guilford Avenue in Baltimore the other day and struck up a friendly, walk-and-talk conversation about Barack Obama. The conversation lasted only five minutes, and, remarkably, the stranger did most of the talking, ending with this parting shot: Don't dismiss the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's suggestion that the U.S. government created the AIDS virus to kill black people as the irrational ravings of an overwrought preacher. "I mean," the man said, "look at what Johns Hopkins did with that sludge. ... Think about it."
Yes, think about it.
A little thinking would be a good idea.
First of all, it wasn't exactly "sludge" that was spread in the yards of nine poor, black families in East Baltimore in 2000. It was compost, commonly available by the name of Orgro. It's an organic fertilizer. Since 1988, a composting facility owned by the city of Baltimore has been making the stuff, and it causes no harm, according to Johns Hopkins officials. It is used on lawns in the suburbs. It was used at Camden Yards.
Which gets to the second thing worth thinking about.
All due respect to the opinionated pedestrian I encountered the other day - and the Reverend Wright, who inspired the thought - but it does not appear that Johns Hopkins researchers were out to kill black people. In fact, it's clear they were trying to spare black children from lead poisoning - maybe even save lives - by using Orgro to combat lead contamination in the soil.
The dean of the Bloomberg School and the president of Kennedy Krieger, two pillars of the Johns Hopkins medical institutions here, pointed all this out in The Sun on Monday. They wrote an op-ed piece to present some facts and silence an alarm sounded two weeks earlier, when The Sun published an Associated Press story that revealed the 2000 experiment.
Was the whole thing a big secret until then?
Apparently, Hopkins told the families who lived in the nine homes what they wanted to do and why, and, apparently, the families gave Hopkins permission to spread the Orgro in an effort to combat lead poisoning. Hopkins found that the fertilizer effectively mitigated lead in the nine yards.
Of course, these facts did not stop certain community leaders, including those with the NAACP, from sounding more alarms and questioning the motives and methods of the experiment.
"Why did they pick this area? Why are the poor always being picked on for these kinds of tests? We just need more information," said Michael Eugene Johnson, state director of the Black United Fund.
