Six Evil Things Our Government Has Done To The Most Vulnerable People Among Us!

By: Donald V. Watkins

Copyrighted on June 15, 2026

Minnie Lee Relf (left) and Mary Alice Relf were victims of forced sterilization in Montgomery, Alabama. This photo of the sisters was taken in 1973.

As a result of my education, professional training, work experience, and mix-race heritage, I am familiar with many of the evil things our government has done to the most vulnerable people among us. Here are six of them:

1. Compulsory Sterilization: Over 30 states passed laws permitting the forced sterilization of people considered "feebleminded," mentally ill, epileptic, or habitual criminals. These people were often poor and members of disfavored or marginalized communities. Indiana enacted the first eugenic sterilization law in 1907. Lawsuits in the 1970s and 80s stopped a eugenic sterilizations in private clinics but forced sterilization programs sponsored by state governments continued into the 21st century. Over 100,000 Black, Latino, and Native American women were sterilized under these programs.

2. Compulsory Lobotomies: The U.S. government, primarily through the Veterans Administration and state-funded mental asylums, aggressively and directly facilitated the lobotomization of approximately 50,000 patients between 1936 and 1972. This practice ended because of federal court orders declaring them to be inhumane.

Two Tulsa, Okla., neurosurgeons are shown using the stereotaxic guide for prefrontal lobotomy on August 17, 1951 at Eastern Oklahoma Hospital in Vinita, Oklahoma.

3. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study: This study was a syphilis research experiment that began in 1932 and lasted 40 years. It’s one of the most infamous cases of medical racism and abuse in U.S. history. With no informed consent, 623 Black men in rural Macon County with low incomes and limited education were used as test subjects — enticed with offerings such as free meals, health care, and burial stipends. They were never provided treatment for their syphilitic condition even though penicillin was available to treat it. The highly unethical syphilis experiment was conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS). The Study did not end because USPHS and Alabama state health officials suddenly valued black lives in 1972. The Study ended only because Washington Star reporter Jean Heller wrote an article about the Study that the Associated Press published worldwide on July 25, 1972. The New York Times published a front-page article about the Study the next day.

Tuskegee Syphilis Study participants being deceived by white medical professionals into thinking they were getting medical treatment for syphilis.

4. The Guatemala Syphilis Experiments: These experiments were United States-led human experiments conducted in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948. The experiments were led by physician John Charles Cutler, who also participated in the late stages of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. Doctors infected 1,300 people, including at least 600 soldiers and people from various impoverished groups (including, but not limited to, sex workers, orphans, inmates of mental hospitals, and prisoners) with syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid, without the informed consent of the subjects. Only 700 of them received treatment. In total, 5,500 people were involved in all research experiments, of whom 83 died by the end of 1953, though it is unknown whether or not the injections were responsible for all these deaths.

A doctor examines a victim of the Guatemalan Syphilis Experiments.

5. The Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative: The Declaration of Independence specifically refers to Native Americans as "merciless Indian savages." Those words were purposely chosen to demean and entire race of people. The U.S. Department of the Interior's Federal Indian Boarding School initiative, which was implemented at 408 schools across 37 states from 1819 to 1969, resulted in the systemic, 153-years-long abuses of millions of Native American children. Multiple investigations have documented the rampant physical and sexual abuse, forced labor, the deliberate and cruel eradication of Indigenous cultures, and the deaths of at least 973 children (many of which were in unmarked graves).

The Carlisle Indian Industrial School student body in 1885. The school was located in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The physical, sexual, and cultural abuse of these students was rampant.

6. Broken Treaties: The U.S. government negotiated more than 500 treaties and agreements with Native American Tribes, with approximately 370 being officially ratified by Congress. Historians and Indigenous rights advocates acknowledge that the United States has willfully and unilaterally violated, altered, or outright broken every single one of these treaties and agreements.

Now you know.