African American AIDS Activism

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 organizat…