ABSTRACT
Patricia Turner is well known for her work on the folklore of African-Americans, and author of I Heard it Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African American Culture (University of California Press, 1993). Here she takes an anthropological/cultural approach in order to present an in-depth survey of the political context in which rumors and legends arose alleging that the Atlanta child murders were attempts by the Center for Disease Control (or the Ku Klux Klan) to provide bodies for experiments with the drug interferon. The essay represents an approach to legend that seeks to understand beliefs and stories in the context of the community in which they are transmitted and that implicitly defines “contemporary legend” in terms of contemporary issues. The essay has been reprinted from Creative Ethnicity: Symbols and Strategies of Contemporary Life, eds. Stephen Stern and John Allan Cicala. 75-86. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1991.
