AIDS Crusade Needs More Than Talk

It took me a while to find the column. I read it and then looked at the date. It had happened on March 27, 1991, exactly 18 years ago.

Eighteen years from the day when so much was going to change, and instead nothing happened, except that things got worse.

This morning at St. Lawrence Catholic Church's Higgins Hall, representatives from more than 100 mostly black churches and a handful of white churches, medical experts, educators, politicians and others are scheduled to meet and confront the epidemic of AIDS and HIV, especially among black women and children.

An organization called the National Black Leadership Commission on HIV/AIDS, based in New York, will be in town to launch an affiliate branch.

A Human Problem

The idea is to come up with some kind of action plan to combat the growing epidemic of HIV/AIDS, especially among blacks, who statistics suggest are six times more likely to have the disease. "It is time we spoke with one loud voice," said retired Monsignor Laurence Higgins, who is hosting today's event. "This is not a black problem but a human one."

I spoke with the Rev. James Favorite of the Beulah Baptist Institutional Church of Tampa, which will serve as permanent home of the affiliate.

"The biggest problem we face," he said, "is that nobody is talking about it. There is a deafening silence, even among church leaders. We need to break that silence. It is not a disease of sinners. I have seen members of my church die who were not even aware they had the disease."

"Did you know that Florida ranks third in the number of cases of HIV/AIDS, and if you look at the per capita numbers, Hillsborough County leads the state?

"What we are going to try and do is involve the entire religious community," Favorite said. "Our common interest is going to be in saving lives. We want to get pastors preaching about the issue from the pulpit and help educate our community about testing and other initiatives."

As I listened to Favorite I couldn't help but remember the Rev. Leon Lowry, the longtime leader of Beulah Baptist, and how he fought to bring the issue into the community.

That's when I dug out the old column. It was about the same issue, AIDS in the black community.

Sylvia Kimbell's Mission

The year was 1991, and Sylvia Kimbell was a Hillsborough County commissioner. If you didn't know her, you missed out. She brought a fiery courage and determination to the commission. I think even then she was fighting the cancer that eventually would take her life, but nothing else seemed to slow her down.

It was Kimbell who rounded up 30 black church leaders and brought them to the bare, un-air-conditioned room in Abe Brown's Prison Crusade building in East Tampa. She recognized the church still was the center of the community for many black residents of Tampa.

When they were trapped inside the room, Kimbell unloaded a barrage of statistics, especially about women and children and the importance of testing.

Yeah, that was 18 years ago. As near as I can tell, nothing - nothing - has changed.

I wish the preachers and the experts luck today as they launch another crusade. You only can hope this time somebody is listening