On July 24, 1972, the Washington Star newspaper broke the story about the Tuskegee Institute syphilis experiment. From 1932 until 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service, in partnership with Tuskegee, secretly studied the effects of untreated syphilis in African-American men in Alabama. Participants were poorly educated, impoverished sharecroppers. The experiments were terminated in November 1972.