A Race to End AIDS: Addressing HIV in the Black Church

The paper will examine the work of SCLC/WOMEN, an adjunct group of the storied Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Beginning in 1986, five years after doctors announced the first cases of what would later become recognized as AIDS, SCLC/WOMEN began working to address the new disease. They kicked off with a May 1986 conference on AIDS in Black communities, but tensions over the place of queer sexuality within the larger movement, simmered underneath the event. Two years later, in 1988, SCLC/WOMEN received funding from the CDC for Reducing AIDS through Community Education (RACE), a new outreach effort that focused on HIV prevention and education programs in Black churches in a handful of U.S. cities. Maurice Franklin, a Black gay man, was hired to direct the RACE program. Over the next several years, Franklinwould come to find that both leaders of SCLC/WOMEN and the churches that partnered with the organization were reluctant to deal with HIV among Black gay men, and in 1992 conflict over a proposed partnership with the African American Lesbian/Gay Alliance led Franklin to resign.

Based on research in the SCLC/WOMEN, Inc. records at Emory University, this paper will offer a detailed account of SCLC/WOMEN’s HIV education and prevention efforts. What types of messages did SCLC/WOMEN craft to educate Black churchgoers about AIDS, and to what extent did these messages address the epidemic among stigmatized groups, such as gay men and intravenous drug users? How was the RACE program received by churches in different parts of the country? In answering these questions, this paper will show a venerable civil rights organization tried to navigate the issues of respectability surrounding the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and will speak to both their successes and their failures in doing so.