A University Confronts the Dark History of a Stolen Heart in a Vibrant Way

The Washington Post

16:22 JST, April 16, 2025

More than 50 years after his heart was taken and used in a landmark transplant without his or his family’s permission, Bruce Tucker’s life has been formally honored in a pair of vibrant murals outside a medical school auditorium in Virginia’s capital.

In one, two large hands hold up a stylized, detached heart.

In the other, a pensive Tucker wears a dark tie.

“Justice begins in the quiet places in the heart,” says one of several quotations from family members that are incorporated into the murals at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

Tucker’s heart has been described as “stolen” by his family and an author, who said surgeons eager to make history took a Black man’s heart less than 24 hours after a fall landed him in the hospital. It was then transplanted into a White businessman.

It’s a fraught moment to confront the racial inequities that run through American history, with Trump administration officials dismantling federal diversity, equity and inclusion programs in Washington and pressuring corporations and universities to pull back from such efforts nationwide.

But the murals to memorialize Tucker, along with new scholarships in his name and a case study exploring the medical ethics of his case, are part of a deeper, years-long conversation involving the university, historians and members of the city’s African American community, many of whom rely on the medical center for lifesaving care despite painful past episodes.

“It matters how we deal with it and how we talk about it, because it’s not a one-off,” said Ryan K. Smith, a history professor at VCU.

He cited past instances of medical mistreatment of African Americans across the country. In and around Tuskegee, Alabama, Black men with syphilis were made part of a decades-long government study of the disease, without their knowledge or consent. Researchers failed to offer them the penicillin that became the standard treatment, allowing the men to suffer. At his own university, the remains of dozens of African Americans, including children, were discovered in a campus well in 1994, the discarded remnants of bodies used for anatomical instruction.

“Tucker’s story is really important, because on the one hand it’s a story about progress. It’s the story about innovation that the university, and America writ large, likes to tell about itself,” Smith said, about the discovery of new treatments and medical advances, including heart transplants. But that progress has harmed many people along the way, he said, making the story just as much “about the same old dynamics that have plagued the country from the beginning.”

Tucker was taken to the emergency room a couple of blocks from the iconic state Capitol designed by Thomas Jefferson, a foundational giant of American democracy who brought enslaved people to the White House when he served as the nation’s third president. Tucker had fallen off a wall and severely injured his head. By the time his brother William arrived at the hospital the next day – May 25, 1968 – he was dead.

The hospital didn’t tell Tucker’s family members that his heart had been transplanted into the businessman – or even that it, and his kidneys, had been taken at all. They learned his organs were missing from an undertaker in Dinwiddie County, south of Richmond, where Tucker had grown up.

Virginia historical resources and transportation officials, working with Tucker’s family and VCU, will soon install a highway marker in the county, just down from Little Bethel Church, where he is buried. It tells his story in fewer than 125 words.

A more detailed history prepared by VCU – accessible by a QR code beside the murals – provides a technical and cutting summary of the facts of the case. Doctors drilled through his skull to release the pressure from a subdural hematoma, or blood buildup, against his brain. But Tucker’s doctor noted around noon on May 25 that “prognosis for recovery is nil and death imminent.” They turned off his respirator at 3:30 p.m., and he was pronounced dead five minutes later.

Tucker was also honored last year in a resolution passed by the General Assembly, which acknowledged “with profound regret the unethical use of Black bodies by medical institutions in the Commonwealth.” It noted that in the 1800s, the Medical College of Virginia – where Tucker was treated, and which later became part of Virginia Commonwealth University – hired grave robbers who dug up Black bodies for teaching surgery and anatomy. It said the history-making transplant using Tucker’s heart was part of a recurring pattern of similar violations over centuries in U.S. and Virginia history.

The momentum for commemorating Tucker so broadly stemmed from the 2020 book “The Organ Thieves,” by Virginia writer Chip Jones, who investigated the 54-year-old laborer’s case.

Jones said the murals – which were painted outside an auditorium renamed for Tucker in a teeming campus building – could bring medical students more deeply into the story of the place that is so vital to their training and future.

“There’s something about paintings or songs or nonverbal responses to stories that makes you stop and think in a different way,” Jones said.

His research helped tell the full story of the family’s loss. He found that Tucker was still able to speak when he entered the hospital, but then lost consciousness. He said Tucker was given solid care by hospital doctors, but only minimal efforts were made to reach Tucker’s brother, whose business card was in Tucker’s pants pocket.

“You can make this clinical argument that Bruce Tucker wasn’t going to survive. But you cannot defend it, on an ethical or moral basis, of what happened to him or to his family that was searching for him that day,” Jones said.

Tucker’s brother learned he was in the hospital on the afternoon of May 25, after a friend who worked there called to quietly notify him, Jones said. When William called the hospital, he was told Tucker was in the operating room, but when he arrived after work to try to see him, at about 7 p.m., he was told he was too late, according to Jones. “You cannot defend that,” he said.

After the family realized, to their horror, that his organs were taken, his brother filed a wrongful-death lawsuit. He lost.

Sheryl Garland, chief of health impact for the VCU Health system, said the leadership team at the institution was asked to read “The Organ Thieves” after it came out. While there was general knowledge of Tucker’s case, the book “really brought to light this story for many of our leaders who may not have been aware of the details,” she said.

In 2022, the university issued an apology for Tucker’s treatment – but ended up offending some of his family members in the process, since it was put forth as a done deal and without their input.

“The university and the health system have truly been on a journey about what does it mean to be humble, and how is it that you engage with families in a healing journey, in a journey of restoration,” Garland said. “Because what organizations may feel is the pathway to restoration may not, and has proven this time, was not, the pathway that felt comfortable for the family.”

One result was the murals, which were created in a partnership with Tucker’s family, VCU design students and Richmond artist Hamilton Glass, and were dedicated in March. Glass is the founder and creative director of Mending Walls RVA, a nonprofit that he said seeks to use public art to encourage empathy and connection. He said the artwork, titled “Humanity of the Heart,” is meant to convey how vital it is to treat every patient “like they belong to someone, like they have a family.”

Garland said she and her colleagues are working on ways to capture community reactions to the murals, as a way of continuing the conversations they spark. A healing garden, which will have a plaque in Tucker’s memory, will add to the work, Garland said. There’s an old marker there celebrating the pioneering heart transplant, but it makes no mention of Tucker.

For Gayle Turner, the moves to lift the memory of “our beloved Bruce” have been meaningful, she said, as has been bringing a measure of accountability in the process. She has held talks with VCU on behalf of the family. (Her mother is Tucker’s first cousin.) Turner still questions whether Tucker received adequate treatment. She wants its medical leaders to take their work reconciling their past even further, by ensuring there is a high level of care for the local community that depends on the university.

“Own it. It’s okay. You can’t undo it,” Turner said about what happened nearly 57 years ago. “These people didn’t actually commit the grievance, right? But I say to them, ‘But you did benefit from it.’”

Tucker was her grandmother’s favorite nephew, she said. He would come over all the time, slim and handsome, with a raspy voice and greenish gray eyes. “She would just run and hug him,” Turner recalled.

She still remembers, with some terror, the quick snap of chicken necks as her grandmother prepared family meals, full of laughter and banter, for Bruce and William. When they were gone, it came to her to see the family’s story through.

“The ancestors,” she said, “didn’t let me rest after that.”