People like Leodus Jones, the founder of Community Assistance for Prisoners (CAP), have been waiting for and fighting for this day for a long time. It’s a shame that Leodus Jones passed away on January 21, 2018, so he can’t see his labor finally pay off.
You see, Leodus Jones was a former inmate incarcerated for some years at Holmesburg prison on State Road. He was one of the many Black men who were experimented on while they were incarcerated by what I chose to call an evil, mad scientist. And to the surprise of many and shock to others, what this “mad scientist” was doing, largely to black men who were incarcerated, was ordained. People in high places knew about it, approved it, and did nothing to help those men. Those who survived prison came out with illnesses and sicknesses, the likes of which many had never seen before.
Adrianne Jones-Alston, one of the daughters of Leodus Jones shared with me–some of how she’s feeling now that an official apology has been issued. Adrianne said, “We are ecstatic. My phone has been ringing off the hook all day today. My siblings have been calling me, saying things like, “You did it, Sis,” but I did not do it alone. At first, I didn’t want to do anything with trying to get apologies for how Black men were experimented on in the 1940s, the 50s, the 60s, and the 70s at Holmesburg. I’ve been praying through this. I did some hard thinking and meditating on this, and I felt compelled to pick up where our father left off. My Daddy put in decades of work on this issue. Those experiments impacted my family in a very powerful way. When I start internalizing some of the things that happened to us as children (there were 8 of us), and I start connecting the dots, as a grown woman, I understand my father’s issues, health-wise, all came from what was done to him in prison. Our father came home chemically damaged.”
The city of Philadelphia issued an apology Thursday, October 6, 2022, for the unethical medical experiments performed on mostly Black inmates at its Holmesburg Prison from the 1950s through the 1970s. This came about because Adrianne Jones-Alston and local community activists, and other families of some of those inmates raised the need for a formal apology.
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