| This project reveals the untold story of African Americans AIDS activists' fight against HIV and AIDS in black communities. I describe the ways that, from 1985 to 2003, the both challenged public and private granting agencies to provide funds for HIV prevention efforts aimed specifically at black communities, and challenged homophobic attitudes among African Americans that, they believed, perpetuated the spread of the disease through stigma and silence. At the same time, they connected the epidemic among African Americans to racism and inequality within the United States, as well as to the pandemic raging throughout the African Diaspora and in the developing world. In this way, I argue, they contested and renegotiated the social and spatial boundaries of black community in the context of a devastating epidemic. At the same time, I also argue, they borrowed political strategies from earlier moments of black political organizing, as they brought key questions of diversity, equality, and public welfare to bear on HIV and AIDS. As they fought for resources with which to stop HIV and AIDS from spreading within their communities, they struggled over the place of blackness amid the shifting politics of race, class, and health in post-Civil Rights America. Adding their story to the emerging narrative of the history of the epidemic thus yields a more expansive and radical picture of AIDS activism in the United States. |
