Dr. Ernest Levister Jr.

While African-Americans represented about 12 percent of the U.S. population, they represented only about 3 percent of the organ donors.

Undaunted, Dr. Callender and his team at Howard University College of Medicine in Washington D.C. spent the next two decades going into the African-American community church by church, health fair by health fair, persuading African-Americans to sign organ donor cards.

Over and over, they heard the same reasons, including that African-Americans wouldn't sign donor cards because they didn't trust the U.S. medical system. 

People in the community recalled Tuskegee's ghosts, the Tuskegee experiments, when doctors in Alabama withheld treatment from poor African-American men with syphilis from 1932 to 1972.

Doctors in other cities including California followed their lead. And they soon started seeing results. In 1982, nationally there were eight organ donors per million African Americans. But by 2002, there were 41 organ donors per million African-Americans, according to Dr. Callender's National Minority Organ Tissue Transplant Education Program. By 2005 that number had increased to 53 per million.

Every day 15 African-Americans die waiting for an organ transplant. Blacks - a group nearly twice as likely as whites to suffer from diabetes and hypertension make up nearly one third of those on the organ transplant waiting list.   

Thanks in large part to Dr. Callender's grass roots ‘a matter of life and death' campaign many more Blacks are donating their organs - choosing instead to remember the Tuskegee experiment while moving forward to help their own. This is a good thing!