The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South

Landmark legislation and Supreme Court rulings in the 1960s enshrined civil rights in law. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination based on race, color, sex, and national origins, while the Voting Rights Act of 1965 made discriminatory voting practices, widely in use in the South, illegal. In Loving v. Virginia in 1967, the Supreme Court ruled that states could not prohibit interracial marriage. In the prior decade, the Supreme Court had ruled in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education that schools could not be racially segregated. These rulings and laws upended the South’s system of enslavement of racial discrimination.

As a result, these changes encountered significant resistance in the South. Presidential candidates such as Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Richard Nixon in 1968 capitalized on white resistance in the South by touting the benefits of states’ rights. At the time, this was code for getting the federal government to stop enforcing civil rights. Elite positions in Virginia, such as those of physicians, judges, and attorneys, were overwhelmingly white as a result of the recent legacy of enslavement. It was commonplace for white attorneys to use their peremptory challenges in legal cases to remove African Americans from the jury. This practice was not outlawed until 1986. Although Virginia was not considered the Deep South, it was a segregated state. Indeed, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) filed more lawsuits in that state than anywhere else in efforts to desegregate buses and restrooms, for example.

When Bruce Tucker was admitted to the emergency room in 1968, racial stereotypes were alive and well in the US. Attitudes had not caught up to laws. The institution thus profiled him as a charity patient and made little effort to locate his next of kin before removing his organs.