Miami Herald - Sunday, July 25, 1999
Stephen Smith - Herald Health Writer

Their pledge at the South Florida HIV/AIDS Town Hall Meeting emerges at the same time elected leaders are mobilizing like never before to stop the spread of the virus, which killed 1,530 Floridians last year, two-thirds of them black.

State Sen. Kendrick Meek, a Miami Democrat, has championed a campaign that will deliver $350,000 this year to Liberty City, the Miami-Dade community hardest hit by AIDS, so that health workers can roam the streets on weekend nights, distributing condoms and information designed to combat the disease and to encourage people to be tested for the virus.

And Gov. Jeb Bush, after reading about the AIDS epidemic in black communities in a series of Herald reports, has vowed to take measures to slow the virus' spread, said state AIDS czar Tom Liberti. Bush and Dr. Robert Brooks, the secretary of Florida's Department of Health, have already talked about what more can be done, and strategies are being developed in Tallahassee, Liberti said.

Tyrance Kingdom, who is infected with the virus, knows where those efforts should be aimed.

"The face of AIDS is the face of people that look like me," said Kingdom, director of a Broward advocacy group called Voices of All People. "I would like to see the help come down to the level of the people who need the help."

And that need for help exists among Hispanics, as well as blacks. While the virus has proved most devastating to blacks, Hispanics have also borne a significant burden, and political and religious leaders from those communities were exhorted Saturday to join the fight against the virus.

Since the start of the epidemic, blacks have accounted for 49 percent of all AIDS cases in Miami-Dade, while Hispanics have made up 33 percent. And since the state began tracking HIV infections in July 1997 -- the best snapshot of where the epidemic is destined -- blacks have constituted 57 percent of new infections in Miami-Dade, Hispanics 29 percent. For AIDS prevention campaigns to succeed, the stigma and rejection that often beset people infected with the virus must be banished, said the Rev. Al Sharpton, the sometimes-controversial, always-provocative New York civil-rights activist who addressed the town hall meeting at the James L. Knight Center. Sometimes, that fear of being ostracized sears so deeply that people die from AIDS without ever acknowledging to relatives the nature of their illness.

"It's bad enough to go through pain, but it's worse to go through pain isolated and marginalized in your own community, in your own neighborhood, in your own house and in your own church," Sharpton said. "So they would rather endure the pain under false pretenses than die two deaths, and that's a sad commentary on us."

Still, Sharpton said, political and health-care leaders have not done enough as the course of the epidemic shifted, becoming a crisis in black and Hispanic communities across the United States.

"It's like spitting in our face to say lift yourself up when you know we don't have the resources to do it," said Sharpton, his words greeted with thundering shouts of approval. "You did not allow that to happen when AIDS had a white face, and we are not going to allow it to happen when it has a brown and a black face."

The South Florida town hall meeting is a prototype for 11 more planned for across the nation. The message everywhere should be the same, said U.S. Rep. Carrie Meek: More must be done, and it must be done quickly.

"Go tell it on the mountain," said Meek, a Miami Democrat. "This is like an albatross around our necks, and it must be removed. Now."

e-mail: sfsmith@herald.com
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