Jenkins worked as a statistician at the United States Public Health Service in the 1960s, and is best known for trying to halt the Tuskegee syphilis experiment in 1968.
[1][2] He spent the rest of his career fighting racism in the U.S. healthcare system, working for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) during the early days of the AIDS crisis, and overseeing the government benefits program for survivors of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
[8] Jenkins' advocacy work concerning the lives of participants did not end with his attempts to expose the study or his aid in running the benefits program for survivors.
[11] In 1980 he joined the Division of Sexually Transmitted Diseases at the CDC, where he was a Supervisory Epidemiologist and manager of the Tuskegee Health Benefit Program.
[12] He later taught in the Epidemiology department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and at Morehouse College in Atlanta Georgia.