A Black man’s stolen heart and a family’s long wait for justice
Decades after a Virginia man’s heart was used in a landmark transplant without consent, his family asks VCU to take action to ensure more people know his name
Perspective by Theresa Vargas
Metro columnist
September 30, 2023 at 11:00 a.m. EDT
Bruce Tucker's gravesite. (Family photo)
Fifty-five years after Bruce Tucker died, questions remain for his family.
They question whether the head injury he experienced when he tumbled off a low concrete wall while with friends was survivable.
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They question whether the 54-year-old was really brain-dead when surgeons at a Virginia hospital removed his heart, without his family’s consent, less than a day after he arrived at the hospital.
They question how their lives might have been different if the hospital staff had told the family the truth — that his heart was used in a landmark transplant — all those decades ago instead of telling them nothing about that surgery.
“What happened 55 years ago shattered and changed the trajectory of our family’s life,” Gayle Turner, a cousin of Bruce Tucker, told me recently. She was 15 when Tucker died. She recalled how her family learned from a mortician, not the hospital, that his heart and kidneys had been removed. She said that when they later found out his heart was placed, without their knowledge or permission, in another man’s chest, they were left feeling “fear, grief, trauma and anger.”
Turner used the words “disrespected,” “desecrated” and “devalued” to describe how the hospital treated Tucker. When that happens to someone you love, it stays with you, she said: “These are the things that trouble the soul. They haunt and traumatize the mind.”
Revelations about the nation’s past medical and scientific practices have caused the public to start to recognize and grapple with how Black, Brown and Indigenous bodies were treated — as objects to be experimented on and used, sometimes over and over again, in whatever ways experts saw fit. Consider the Smithsonian Institution’s “racial brain collection” or Henrietta Lacks’s “immortal” cells.
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What happened to Bruce Tucker is part of that shameful history. He was a Black man whose heart ended up in a White man’s chest in a transplant that brought his family pain and a Virginia hospital prestige. That heart transplant was the first one performed in Virginia.
But Tucker’s story is also not yet over. How his family and officials at Virginia Commonwealth University are moving forward could soon make a name that was omitted from history well known.
The university, which oversees the hospital system that was once known as the Medical College of Virginia, where Tucker ended up on May 24, 1968, issued a formal apology to his family last September. That apology, which was part of a resolution that also called for the creation of a plaque, was approved by the university’s Board of Visitors and the VCU Health System Board of Directors. It also came after former Richmond journalist Chip Jones published a book about the transplant titled “The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South” and called on the university to apologize.
University officials could have done nothing more after that. But last month, Turner said, they listened as she explained to them why that apology felt hollow to the family. She learned about the apology through news accounts, and Tucker’s son, Abraham, who was a teenager when his dad died, had to retrieve a certified letter from the post office to hear about it.
Turner, serving as her family’s representative, said she asked to meet with university officials because she wanted them to understand why Tucker deserved to be acknowledged with meaningful actions, not just words and a plaque.
“I wanted to make sure they understood who he was and who loved him,” she told me. She said on the day she spoke with officials, she shared with them that Tucker was a father, a big brother, a favorite nephew and a loyal employee who worked for the same company for more than 20 years. She also told them that he was a human who deserved the same level care as someone who wasn’t Black.
Turner said she left that meeting not knowing what to expect but hoping officials would respond with action that showed they understood the harm that was caused and the value in honoring his life. Even before his death, the local Black community held a distrust of the hospital, she said. His stolen organs confirmed those fears for many.
The experimentation on Black bodies and the grave robbing that took place in African American cemeteries is often talked about in the context of our nation’s past. But the legacy of that mistrust, along with ongoing medical racism, leads to avoided appointments, missed diagnoses and early deaths. When I talked to Turner, it was clear she had given a lot of thought not just to past harms, but also to future possibilities.
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Turner said she made several requests of the university on behalf of her family. One of them: That Tucker’s name be included everywhere that the university mention the surgeons who performed the transplant, Richard Lower and David Hume. Another: That a historical marker be placed near where Tucker is buried.
Turner said she recently heard from university officials, and they agreed to take those actions. In response to a request for a comment, a university spokesperson said in an email, “We have been engaged in conversations with Mr. Tucker’s family and we are looking forward to collaborating in the future.”
Turner said the details of the family’s other request are still being worked out and she wanted to give the university some time before discussing them publicly.
“I’m feeling optimistic that what they say they will do is what they will do,” Turner said. “It’s important in terms of reconciliation and accountability and justice for Bruce.”
Jones, who wrote the book about the transplant, took a photo a few years ago of a plaque outside a VCU hospital building. He noticed not only what it said — “Birthplace of Cardiac Transplantation” — but also what it didn’t say. It contained the names of Lower and Hume but not of Tucker. Jones said making sure Tucker’s name is featured alongside the surgeons’ names is an important step toward justice and that he would ultimately like to see the university rename its transplant center after him.
A plaque notes the significance of the heart transplant. (Family photo)
“That would be a complete embrace of the pain they endured and are still enduring,” Jones said of the family.
Jones said he set out to write a book about the race to perform a heart transplant when he found Tucker’s name and started looking into what happened to him. Some of the details he unearthed: Tucker was talking when he arrived at the hospital but soon ended up connected to a ventilator. Tucker was carrying his brother William’s business card in his pocket, but hospital staff didn’t call William, and later, when he showed up, didn’t tell him about the transplant. When Tucker’s mother found out his heart was gone, she screamed in a way that those who witnessed it didn’t forget. The book also delves into the lawsuit William lost in 1972. Former Virginia governor L. Douglas Wilder served as his attorney and one of the issues debated in court was whether Tucker should have been declared dead. A medical examiner performed a test that found he had no brain activity, but the legal definition of brain death did not yet exist.
Turner said her family has questions that will never get answered. She has accepted that they will never know what happened to Tucker in the hospital all those years ago. But she expressed hope for what could come from recognizing his contribution now.
That day she spoke to university officials, she told them, “The harm is irreparable, but a level of healing is possible.”
