African American AIDS Activism

Unsung History

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the CDC), in 2018, 13% of the US population was Black and African American, but 42% of new HIV diagnoses in the US were from Black and African American people. This discrepancy is not new.

On June 5, 1981, the CDC first published an article in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) titled “Pneumocystis Pneumonia” that suggested that there might be “a cellular-immune dysfunction related to a common exposure that predisposes individuals to opportunistic infections such as pneumocystosis and candidiasis” to explain a number of infections they were seeing among gay men.

This early identification of HIV/AIDS as a disease of white gay men colored the response to the epidemic. As gay men organized AIDS education and support networks they built organizations staffed by white volunteers and situated in gay neighborhoods in major urban centers. Because of racism and segregation many of those gay neighborhoods were largely white, and the education and support campaigns didn’t reach the Black and brown communities that were also affected by the disease.

In response, African American AIDS activists formed their own organizations from the beginning of the crisis. African American AIDS activism was diverse and creative from the early days of the pandemic, and it continues today, but it’s often been missing from popular media and historical writing about AIDS.

In this episode, Kelly briefly tells the background of African American AIDS activism and interviews Dan Royles, Assistant Professor of History at Florida International University and author of To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle against HIV/AIDS, which was recently named a Finalist in the 2021 Museum of African American History Stone Book Award.

Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. Episode image by Tobe Mokolo on Unsplash.

Sources:

• To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle Against Hiv/AIDS, by Dan Royles, 2020.
• “Forty years after first documented AIDS cases, survivors reckon with 'dichotomy of feelings,'” by Alex Berg, NBC News, June 5, 2021.
• “Pneumocystis Pneumonia --- Los Angeles,” MMWR, Reported by MS Gottlieb, MD, HM Schanker, MD, PT Fan, MD, A Saxon, MD, JD Weisman, DO, Div of Clinical Immunology-Allergy; Dept of Medicine, UCLA School of Medicine; I Pozalski, MD, Cedars-Mt. Sinai Hospital, Los Angeles; Field services Div, Epidemiology Program Office, CDC. June 5, 1981
• “HIV and African American People,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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