Black leaders: Ending AIDS must be our job

Beth Duff-Brown

TORONTO — Julian Bond, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and other powerful African American leaders called on the black community Monday to accept responsibility for ending the devastation of AIDS, which has claimed more than 200,000 of their own since the epidemic began.

In a first for African American political leaders — not just black AIDS activists or health care workers — the delegation attending the 16th International AIDS Conference blamed themselves for a lack of will and pledged to do more.

“The story of AIDS in America is mostly one of a failure to lead and nowhere is this truer than in our black communities,” said Bond, chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “We have led successful responses to many other challenges in the past. Now is the time for us to face the fact that AIDS has become a black disease.”

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, African Americans account for half of all new cases of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. It is the leading cause of death for black women between the ages of 25 and to 34. Overall, blacks are seven times more likely to die from AIDS than other at-risk groups.

Since the first cases of HIV/AIDS were reported 25 years ago, African Americans have accounted for 40 percent of the estimated 944,306 AIDS cases diagnosed in the United States. Though December 2004, the most recent statistics available, an estimated 201,045 African Americans have died of AIDS.

“Because of poverty, ignorance and prejudice, AIDS has been allowed to stalk and kill black America like a serial killer,” said Jackson, chairman of Rainbow PUSH Coalition. Jackson did not make the conference, but issued a statement of support with the other leaders.

“But we have also been a compliant victim, submitting through inaction,” Jackson said. “We have a lesson to learn from our gay brothers and sisters who fought back when AIDS attacked their communities two decades ago. They started to save themselves, in part by using strategies from our civil rights playbook. It is now time for us to fight AIDS like the major civil rights issue it is.”

The delegation to the conference includes Congresswoman Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, Cheryl Cooper, executive director of the National Council of Negro Women and George Curry, editor in chief of the National Newspaper Publishers Association.

They signed a declaration that pledged to draft a five-year plan to reduce HIV rates among African Americans and boost the percentage of blacks who get tests and know their HIV status.

Bond also pledged to include HIV testing and education at the NAACP’s seven regional civil rights training institutes and at its annual convention. He said he would also advocate AIDS testing for prisoners on the federal and state level.

(Associated Press)