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

On April 26, 1994, Chris Egghart, an employee of the Archaeological Research Center at VCU (formerly MCV), received a call from the campus police: Construction workers had discovered bones near the site of the old Egyptian, or Medical School, building. Discovering a closed well, Egghart found many bones and personal items. The head of archaeological research, Daniel Mouer, and his staff worked diligently over the next few days to prepare the site, halting construction to do so. The team had found the East Marshall Street well, which offered a “window not only into medicine’s past, but into the very heart of Virginia history” (308), including its slavery era.

However, VCU’s president, Eugene Trani, sought to raise the national profile of the university and had ambitious plans for development. He ordered Mouer to allow construction to resume on Monday, May 2. Mouer had to comply with the order. By the time construction resumed, the archaeological team had recovered the remains of 53 humans, most African American and adult though also including nine children and one baby. Historical records of work-related bills at MCV indicated that “demonstrators” in anatomy classes used this well to dispose of human remains between 1848 and 1860.

More than 20 years later, in 2016, MCV’s past arose. The “Descendant Community” group advocated “ways to study and memorialize the people who’d been exploited, and ultimately dumped, by MCV in years past” (315). The University admitted to its dehumanizing practices in the 19th century as well as errors in handling the discovery of remains in 1994. Under the leadership of President Michael Rao, VCU made efforts to memorialize and research these individuals by creating memorial sites, conducting genetic testing to identify descendants and other means. In late 2018, 40 people attended a ceremony to “‘honor those who were dishonored’” (316), as a Richmond councilwoman noted. Jones comments that before that date in 2018, no one had contacted Bruce Tucker’s relatives to honor their dignity.

After the Tucker trial, Lower continued to perform heart surgeries and transplants until he left MCV in 1989. He performed a successful triple bypass operation on Jack Russell, the attorney who led the defense team in the trial. By the 1980s, Lower was using a new antirejection drug, cyclosporine, which “dramatically improved his patients’ survival rates” (317). Nonetheless, of Lower’s 18 human heart transplant recipients, only four were still alive. Two-thirds died within 70 days of the transplant. In retrospect, Lower concluded that the optimism about heart transplants was overstated, and he recommended that they be performed only for terminal patients. When Lower left MCV in 1989, he and his wife moved to Montana, where he managed a ranch for five years. He then returned to Richmond, volunteering at a free clinic for low-income residents for 10 years.

Hume died on May 19, 1973, when a small plane he was piloting crashed. He left a wife and four children. Wilder, while still practicing law, became more involved in Virginia politics. He successfully convinced the state to recognize Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1984; however, the state celebrated Confederate heroes on the same day. In 1989, Wilder, the grandson of enslaved individuals, became the first African American elected governor in the US.

Judge Compton was subsequently named to the Supreme Court of Virginia, serving on it from 1974 through 2000 and then as a senior justice until his death in 2006. Lower’s wife, Anne, contacted him after Wilder’s inauguration as governor to request records from the trial. To her dismay, as well as Wilder’s, no records remained. Jones observes that the “missing court record could serve as a metaphor for the mistreatment of Bruce Tucker” (323). Even in 2018, the online history of VCU made no mention of Bruce’s contribution to the heart transplant program. However, the college teaches medical students about its history of racial discrimination and shows them photographs of MCV’s rat-infested St. Philip Hospital, which served African Americans. VCU is not the only medical school with a legacy of injustice, though its injustice to Bruce Tucker and his family is more recent than injustices at other medical schools.

In December 2018, Jones searched for the farmhouse where Bruce and William Tucker once lived in a rural county of Virginia. Jones had written to Abraham, Bruce’s son, multiple times but never received a reply. Abraham had joined the Army and was honored for his service at the Fort Lee post exchange. Informed that Abraham no longer worked at Fort Lee, Jones asked a church sexton who knew the family where he might find Abraham. Following difficult directions on a “seldom-used road” (331), Jones found Abraham at his home. Jones tried to make a connection with him and get him to talk, but Abraham refused. Chastising himself for making a weak case to Abraham, Jones went on his way.