Fifty years after the Tuskegee syphilis study was conducted on hundreds of Black men, the Milbank Memorial Fund publicly apologized to descendants of the study's victims for its role NPR reports.

"It was wrong. We are ashamed of our role. We are deeply sorry," said Christopher F. Koller, the current president of the fund.

Along with an apology, a donation was made to the Voices for Our Fathers Legacy Foundation, a group that advocates for the men who participated in the study, at a ceremony.

Koller said that there is no explanation of how the leadership of the fund decided to offer compensation or to justify what took place.

"The upshot of this was real harm," Koller told The Associated Press. "It was one more example of ways that men in the study were deceived. And we are dealing as individuals, as a region, as a country, with the impact of that deceit."

Lillie Tyson Head, president of the Voices group and the daughter of Freddie Lee Tyson who was part of the study described the apology as "a wonderful gesture and a wonderful thing," although it comes 25 years after the U.S. government apologized for the study to its final survivors. The remaining survivors have all passed away.

"It's really something that could be used as an example of how apologies can be powerful in making reparations and restorative justice real," said Head.

Head was not aware of Milbank's role in the study until Koller contacted her last year. Although payments to victims have been taught in universities and in some publications, the descendants never knew that Millbank was the financier.

"It really was something that caught me off guard," she said. "It's really important because at a time when the nation is so divided, how we come to terms with our racism is so complicated,

"Confronting it is difficult, and they didn't have to do this. I think it's a really good example of history as restorative justice," she added.

Beginning in 1932 and concluding in 1972,  the United States Public Health Service (PHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) conducted the study on a group of nearly 400 Black men who had contracted syphilis. The purpose of the experiment was to observe the effects of the disease when subjects were left untreated but by the end of the study advances in medicine made the disease treatable. The men were not privy to the entire scope of the experiment and over 100 died.

Amazingly, the study continued, until 1972, under numerous Public Health Service officials, when a leak to the press caused the study to be terminated in November of that year. According to the results of the study, "28 patients had died directly from syphilis, 100 died from complications related to syphilis, 40 of the patients' wives were infected with syphilis, and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis."

In exchange for the men's participation in the study, the Milbank Memorial Fund promised to cover any funeral costs which would only amount to $100. For the families of the victims to receive the compensation, they had to consent to letting doctors conduct autopsies that would detail the ravages of a disease that the victims were told was “bad blood.”

Endowed in 1905 by Elizabeth Milbank Anderson, the Milbank Memorial Fund was one of the first private foundations established in the U.S.