To Make the Wounded Whole

Dan Royles

Description

In the decades since it was identified in 1981, HIV/AIDS has devastated African American communities. Members of those communities mobilized to fight the epidemic and its consequences from the beginning of the AIDS activist movement. They struggled not only to overcome the stigma and denial surrounding a "white gay disease" in Black America, but also to bring resources to struggling communities that were often dismissed as too "hard to reach." To Make the Wounded Whole offers the first history of African American AIDS activism in all of its depth and breadth. Dan Royles introduces a diverse constellation of activists, including medical professionals, Black gay intellectuals, church pastors, Nation of Islam leaders, recovering drug users, and Black feminists who pursued a wide array of grassroots approaches to slow the epidemic's spread and address its impacts. Through interlinked stories from Philadelphia and Atlanta to South Africa and back again, Royles documents the diverse, creative, and global work of African American activists in the decades-long battle against HIV/AIDS.

Sujets

• HIV
• Globalization
• HIV/AIDS in the United States
• Afrocentrism
• Public health
• Black church
• Medical Apartheid
• VIH

Informations

• Publié par: The University of North Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 21 juillet 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781469659510
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

TO MAKE THE WOUNDED WHOLE
JUSTICE, POWER, AND POLITICS
Coeditors
Heather Ann Thompson
Rhonda Y. Williams
Editorial Advisory Board
Peniel E. Joseph
Daryl Maeda
Barbara Ransby
Vicki L. Ruiz
Marc Stein
The Justice, Power, and Politics series publishes new works in history that explore the myriad struggles for justice, battles for power, and shifts in politics that have shaped the United States over time. Through the lenses of justice, power, and politics, the series seeks to broaden scholarly debates about America s past as well as to inform public discussions about its future.
More information on the series, including a complete list of books published, is available at http://justicepowerandpolitics.com/ .
TO MAKE THE WOUNDED WHOLE
THE AFRICAN AMERICAN STRUGGLE AGAINST HIV/AIDS
Dan Royles
The University of North Carolina Press | Chapel Hill
2020 Dan Royles
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Designed by April Leidig
Set in Minion by Copperline Book Services, Inc.
The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.
Cover illustration: Don t Love Your Partner to Death , from an AIDS education poster by Stephen John Phillips. Courtesy Rare Books and Special Collections, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Royles, Dan, author.
Title: To make the wounded whole : the African American struggle against HIV/AIDS / Dan Royles.
Other titles: Justice, power, and politics.
Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, 2020. | Series: Justice, power, and politics | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020011785 | ISBN 9781469659503 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469661339 (paperback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469659510 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH : AIDS (Disease)-United States-History-20th century. | AIDS activists-United States. | African Americans-Diseases. | African Americans-Political activity.
Classification: LCC RA 643.83 . R 693 2020 | DDC 362.19697/9200973-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020011785
Portions of chapter 1 previously appeared in Dan Royles, Don t We Die Too? : The Politics of AIDS and Race in Philadelphia, in Beyond the Politics of the Closet: Gay Rights and the American State since the 1970s , ed. Jonathan Bell (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 100-117. 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press.
To all those who break the silence
CONTENTS
Introduction: The AIDS Capital of the World
Chapter 1 A Disease, Not a Lifestyle: Race, Sexuality, and AIDS in the City of Brotherly Love
Chapter 2 Nurturing Growth in Those Empty Spaces: Blackness and Multiculturalism in AIDS Education
Chapter 3 Black Men Loving Black Men Is a Revolutionary Act: Gay Men of African Descent, the Black Gay Renaissance, and the Politics of Self-Esteem
Chapter 4 We ve Been Doing This for a Few Thousand Years: The Nation of Islam s African AIDS Cure
Chapter 5 There Is a Balm in Gilead: AIDS Activism in the Black Church
Chapter 6 Stop Medical Apartheid from South Africa to Philadelphia: ACT UP Philadelphia and the Movement for Global Treatment Access
Chapter 7 The South within the North: SisterLove s Intersectional Approach to HIV/AIDS
Conclusion: Generations of Activism
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
Hot, Horny Healthy! flyer, 1990
Anybody Can Get AIDS , ca. 1987
AIDS in the Black Community, ca. 1987
National Task Force on AIDS Prevention staff, 1991
Early Advocacy and Care for HIV flyer, ca. 1993
Gay Men of African Descent Calendar , December 1989
Gay Men of African Descent Calendar , December 1994
Tongues Untied poster, 1989
Philadelphia Sunday Sun front page, 1992
Pernessa Seele and clergy leading the first annual Harlem Week of Prayer, 1989
The African American Clergy s Declaration of War on HIV/AIDS , 1994
ACT UP Philadelphia protest, 1999
Bush Greed Kills dollar bill, ca. 2002
D zon Dixon Diallo
TO MAKE THE WOUNDED WHOLE
Introduction
The AIDS Capital of the World
I N 1985 RESEARCHERS and reporters alike focused their attention on the city with the highest rate of AIDS diagnoses anywhere, a city that had become colloquially known as the AIDS Capital of the World. This city was neither New York City nor San Francisco, nor was it to be found in Haiti, all places that had become identified with the new disease. The place with the highest per capita rate of the most fearsome epidemic on Earth was a small rural community in South Florida called Belle Glade. There, public health officials were baffled by the local epidemic, which looked altogether different from anything they had seen before.
THE BLACK SOIL IN THE FIELDS that surround Belle Glade, also known as Muck City, is unbelievably rich. Since the draining of the Everglades began over a century ago, that soil has yielded countless bushels of potatoes, sweet corn, and string beans, along with tons of sugarcane. The soil is so rich because, for millennia, nearby Lake Okeechobee would overflow with heavy rains, depositing loamy black silt-the muck that gives Belle Glade its nickname-on the land where the town and its surrounding farms now sit. The soil is so rich, in fact, that it sometimes catches fire. 1
For as long as Belle Glade has produced vegetables and sugar for the rest of the country, it has attracted migrant workers from other parts of the U.S. South and the Caribbean. These men and women are overworked and underpaid. Zora Neale Hurston described life there during the 1920s in Their Eyes Were Watching God , including the hordes of workers [that] poured in during picking season, permanent transients with no attachments and tired looking men with their families and dogs in flivvers. During the 1930s, U.S. Sugar used the promise of good pay to lure Black 2 workers to its brand-new mill in nearby Lewiston. When they arrived, the migrants found themselves plunged into debt peonage, working under white overseers who promised a beating or worse to those who tried to escape. Some decades later, Belle Glade featured prominently in the 1960 CBS documentary Harvest of Shame , which exposed terrible working conditions for migrant farm laborers across the country. We used to own our slaves, one farmer told reporters. Now we just rent them. 3
By the 1980s, conditions in Belle Glade had changed very little. If anything, they had gotten worse. Year-round Black residents crammed into the derelict apartment buildings, mobile homes, and shacks that dotted the old colored town in southwest Belle Glade. Their bodies bore scars from the field knives and machetes used to harvest lettuce, corn, and cane. During the cutting season, as many as ten thousand migrant workers flooded in from Haiti, Jamaica, and the Bahamas to work in the fields. In the midst of the sugarcane harvest, prostitution and drug use flourished. Injection drugs, popular in the early 1980s, gave way to crack cocaine as the decade wore on. A concurrent rise in rates of gonorrhea and syphilis pointed to crack s power to lower sexual inhibitions, as users sought out multiple partners and sometimes traded sex for the drug. 4 Not unlike the combustible soil that surrounded it, Belle Glade was fertile ground for HIV .
In the early 1980s, Dr. Ron Wiewora ran the town s public health clinic out of a trailer on Avenue D, which runs west to east through the middle of colored town. By 1984 he noticed a growing number of residents seeking treatment for AIDS . He began keeping track of these patients and their connections to one another-whether they had shared needles or had been sexual partners. Around the same time, a pair of researchers from the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Miami were also homing in on Belle Glade. One of them, Dr. Mark Whiteside, treated a vegetable packer for cryptosporidiosis, a parasitic infection frequently seen in people with AIDS . The vegetable packer led Whiteside and his partner, Dr. Carolyn MacLeod, back to Belle Glade.
For Wiewora, Whiteside, and McLeod, the outbreak in Belle Glade didn t make any sense. Most of the reported AIDS cases in America were among gay men in big cities like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. But about half of the Belle Glade cases were in women, and almost all of those diagnosed were straight. The small community s per capita AIDS rate was also five times higher than New York City s and seven times higher than San Francisco s.
Few of the patients they saw fit into the identified risk groups of gay men or intravenous drug users, so Whiteside and MacLeod looked for explanations that didn t involve sex or shared needles. They proposed that the disease might be tied in some way to poverty: to the rats that scurried through apartments and shacks, or to the human excrement that lined Belle Glade s streets and yards. Perhaps poverty and malnutrition made residents more susceptible to infection from mosquito bites, which didn t seem to be a factor anywhere else. Whiteside presented this theory in April 1985 at the First International AIDS Conference in Atlanta. His theory-and Belle Glade-became a media sensation. 5
It s easy to see why: Whiteside pointed to casual contact and the environment as vectors of transmission. The map of Belle Glade that he presented in Atlanta used stars to indicate where residents with AIDS had lived; it looked like the one that John Snow had created to trace an 1854 cholera outbreak in London to a single water pump on Broad Street, or like the map