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One Black Church in Miami Takes A Rocky Journey to Confront AIDS
The Wall Street Journal
By ANN CARRNS
February 14, 2002
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MIAMI -- Not long after he arrived at predominantly black Mount Tabor
Missionary Baptist Church in 1989, Rev. George McRae was invited to visit
the local county hospital. The chaplain there, who was white, didn't
disclose the purpose of the meeting. Rev. McRae was startled when he entered
a ward filled with black men and women, all dying of AIDS. Shunned by family
and friends, several patients sobbed when Rev. McRae took their hands in
his.
"It was embarrassing and painful, that someone from another community had to
call me and show me how my own people were suffering," he recalls.
That visit was the start of an extraordinary journey for Rev. McRae and his
church in Liberty City, a mostly black neighborhood plagued by poverty,
crime and drugs. A congregation that had never heard the word "AIDS" during
Sunday services now has weekly condom giveaways. Volunteers visit and
counsel inmates in jails, where the black population -- and rates of
infection with the HIV virus that causes AIDS -- are disproportionately
high. Rev. McRae travels throughout Florida and to other states, advising
black congregations on starting AIDS programs.
"Every black church should have an AIDS ministry," he says. But relatively
few do. At a time when AIDS is ravaging the African-American community, the
nation's black churches -- generally leaders in the war on racial
discrimination -- have been slow to respond.
AIDS now is the leading cause of death among African-Americans between the
ages of 25 and 44. About half of all new HIV cases in the U.S. each year are
black men and women, even though African-Americans constitute only 13% of
the population. Factors behind the grim statistics include higher rates of
poverty and incarceration and relatively limited access to medical services.
Another factor is an aversion to homosexuality. In a speech in Atlanta last
year, civil-rights leader Coretta Scott King called for a "national campaign
against homophobia in the black community." While discrimination against
homosexuals remains "a great problem throughout America," she said, "in the
African-American community it is even more threatening."
In the fall of 2000, Rev. McRae gave a talk at an AIDS conference in Atlanta
entitled, "The Black Church as Change Agent." The title provoked derision
from some attendees. "The black church has allowed gay black men to die like
flies," says Roosevelt Mosby Jr., an advocate for gay youth in Oakland,
Calif. "Before the church can be a change agent, it has to change its very
self."
Fear of Gossip?
Rev. James Jackson, pastor of Cornish Memorial A.M.E. Zion Church in Key
West, Fla., expresses a common view that black congregants with HIV or AIDS
are probably reluctant to seek help within their church, because people
might gossip. "People are just more comfortable going to a clinic, where
there's a doctor, than to a church, because they might be labeled as drug
users or homosexuals," he says.
Rev. McRae, who is 60 years old, himself acknowledges ambivalence. "I cannot
condone homosexuality because the Bible doesn't," he says. "But I don't
reject a gay person, any more than an adulterer or a murderer."
The comparison may not reassure homosexuals seeking equal treatment. But in
Liberty City, Rev. McRae has become a force for opening minds about AIDS.
Urban Ills
The reverend, who grew up in Palatka, a rural small town in northeast
Florida, had to grapple with the urban ills of Liberty City immediately upon
arrival. Prostitutes were conducting business in the shade of a massive oak
tree across from Mount Tabor's entrance. Just a block away, 18th Avenue was
-- and still is -- a dangerous drug bazaar. A chain-link fence topped with
barbed wire gives the church itself a forbidding appearance. A stucco cross
rising from the roof identifies the spare, two-story building as a house of
worship.
"I thought he was mad," to move to the Miami slum from a church in Daytona
Beach, Fla., says Theodore McRae, Rev. McRae's 40-year-old son, himself a
minister in Gainesville, Fla.
At first, Rev. McRae carried a .38-caliber handgun when he ventured into
Liberty City at night. These days, he leaves the weapon at home, confident
that he has won the respect of even the street criminals in the
neighborhood.
That respect was earned with a combination of compassion and an instinct for
getting results without direct confrontation. Instead of calling police to
disperse the prostitutes across from the church, Rev. McRae introduced
himself to the women and offered counseling. But he also cut down the tree
shielding them from Miami's tropical sun, prompting the prostitutes to ply
their trade elsewhere.
Determined to fight drug addiction in Liberty City, Mr. McRae soon expanded
the church's Sunday breakfast into a "feeding ministry" that evolved into a
forum to encourage HIV testing. The change didn't sit well with some church
members. For years, they had been able to buy for $2.50 a meal of eggs, ham,
French toast and grits -- made to order, like in a restaurant. Now, there
was grumbling about street people, some of them ill, eating for free. Cooks
hustling to feed the larger crowd lacked time to make individual orders.
Some longtime members began refusing to pay for their meals.
Rev. McRae wouldn't back down. He let it be known that anyone unhappy with
the new Sunday arrangement could eat at home. The complaints abated.
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