It was in 1988," the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. tells HIV Plus as he sits in his office at the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition headquarters in Chicago. Jackson is remembering back to when AIDS first became an issue in his life: "That's when the right wing was preaching about it as a sin. Not a disease but as a sin. Parents were kicking family members out of their homes when they found out they had HIV."

The time was during Jackson's run for the Democratic presidential nomination, and so he stayed in AIDS hospices several times to focus attention on the issue. But like with many other Americans, for Jackson the reality of AIDS hit a lot closer to home; it was not just some abstract campaign issue. He recalls the day when a young neighbor girl who had grown up like a member of his own family, a playmate and friend to his children, sought him out. "Rae came to me one morning in the kitchen and said she needed to talk with me," Jackson says. "She said she had HIV and was moving fast toward AIDS." (Now an HIV/AIDS activist, that young girl, Rae Lewis-Thornton, is a consultant to Jackson's staff.) Around the same time, another close family friend, Keith Barrow—the son of civil rights leader the Rev. Willie Barrow, who is cochair of the PUSH board—died of AIDS complications. Keith had grown up singing in Jackson's organization's choir.

"And so I became acquainted with [AIDS]," Jackson says, "and had to come to grips with it."

Earlier in the day as a gospel choir set a spirited tone on this Saturday morning, Jackson warmed up the audience at the weekly forum at his Rainbow/People United to Serve Humanity Coalition headquarters by chanting some of his signature phrases: "I am somebody" and "Keep hope alive." Jackson has used them in speeches everywhere, whether in his presidential campaign or dealing with the many wide-ranging issues that he has tackled in his characteristic splashy and passionate style. But his calls for self-respect and abiding faith seem especially well-suited to his latest campaign. In the past year Jackson has begun using the bully pulpit of his famous name and galvanizing personality to draw attention to the growing devastation of African-Americans by AIDS. He has implored them to get tested for HIV and find out if they are positive or not. On this morning he calls out some of the new words he is trying to turn into mantras: "Detection, prevention, and cure. There is no downside to taking the test. There's no upside to ignorance."

Nearly two decades after AIDS first began making headlines, what has propelled Jackson into this role is the alarming rate at which the disease has been hitting black Americans. AIDS is the leading killer of African-American men between the ages of 25 and 44 and the second-leading killer of African-American women in the same age group. One in 50 black men in the United States is now infected with HIV. And while blacks make up about 13% of the U.S. population, more than half of all new HIV infections each year are among African-Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 1993 blacks accounted for 34% of all AIDS deaths, while whites were 48%; by 1998 the proportions had been reversed—49% of AIDS deaths were of blacks; 32%, whites.

A preacher as much as a politician, Jackson has found a lesson in the Bible that he repeats often. Jesus chose to spend his last night, Jackson says, in the home of a leper. "Leprosy was kind of [the AIDS] of his time," he says. "It was his way of saying, 'You cannot dismiss a health crisis as some unforgivable sin.' "

Jackson, president and CEO of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, has led by example, taking oral HIV tests publicly in what he hopes is a way to destigmatize something that still carries a sense of shame for some people. Jackson has sought especially to reach African-Americans through their churches. He is making a loud call these days on ministers to demonstrate their leadership by getting tested from their pulpits. "Church by church, block by block," people must get tested, he says. "We have the power through the pulpit to break through the fear and mythology." On the first day of the July convention Jackson got more than 100 ministers to take an HIV antibody test—before an audience.

He wants that to be just the beginning, though. He hopes that by having ministers, community leaders, and peers who live and work daily alongside other African-Americans show that there is no real stigma associated with taking an HIV test, the effort can diminish that sense of shame—that fear for many black men to even be tested. And indeed, the problem, Jackson acknowledges, is mainly with getting black men to be tested: "When those 100 ministers from PUSH stood up and took the test, the women watching rejoiced."

Jackson knows it won't be easy, as he says, to "remove the taboo, the stigma" of getting tested. "Testing leads to health," he says. "Because if you don't have it, thumbs up. If you do have it and detect it early, still thumbs up" because then you know you must go and get the medical attention you need. "There is no upside to ignorance." For this reason, he is planning even more ways to reach out. "We must use the movie and music industries to reach out to men," he says. "We must get the message across by dealing with them at their level."

The coalition launched its national HIV/AIDS campaign in February at the National African-American Conference on AIDS. Known as PUSH for Life: An HIV/AIDS Initiative, the project is directed by Lydia Watts, who came from the Chicago Department of Health's Correctional Health Care Initiatives, and has received funding from Bristol-Myers Squibb, an anti-HIV drug maker.

"We're moving toward getting civil rights leaders and ministers and leaders in the community looking at this issue as the number 1 issue," Watts says. "If we don't address the health care of our community, it's going to be difficult for us to address economic development or other rights and needs of our community."

The initiative's leaders envision a multipart strategy embracing lobbying, public awareness, community building, and research. They have developed recommendations—costing about $2 billion to implement—that include pressing for the expansion of Medicare coverage to include low-income, HIV-infected people; advocating for a $1 billion increase in the fiscal year 2001 federal budget to target community-based organizations serving communities of color; reducing new HIV infection rates by 3% in high-risk populations by 2005; and doubling the number of people of color who get tested and then, if need be, treated.

At the July convention Jackson helped to organize a "town hall meeting" titled AIDS: Ending the Silence, Ending the Epidemic [see accompanying articles on pages 18-21]. A panel consisting of Jackson and seven other leading African-American educators, medical professionals, and activists, was broadcast live nationwide on Black Entertainment Television. They discussed many of the issues connected with the disease and its treatment. "Let's remove the shame of taking the test," Jackson told the studio and television audience. "You may have gotten it from a gay relationship, or it may have been from forced sex in jail. It may have been a monogamous woman with a loose-living man. A baby who contracted it from parents." But no matter how the method of infection occurred, Jackson brings home his point: "We must move beyond the fear of it and courageously kill the disease before the disease kills us."

Jackson and other leaders say reaching African-Americans means overcoming other prejudices they may harbor. Many still consider HIV to be a gay problem because its impact was first mainly on gay men in the early 1980s. "Some people lie on that question—if they are gay," Jackson says. "Some people would just rather die" than simply have the test done and find out if they need to move on to medical help.

"There are so many ways to get the virus," Jackson says, "so all that we really need to know is if you do have it so you can seek help. People don't worry about how you caught cancer. They don't ask 'Did you catch it by eating meat?' 'Did you catch it because you were living a little too close to electric power lines?' People aren't questioning how you caught cancer. If someone has cancer, you say, 'Is it operable?' "

The disease's association with gay people, though, has also offered a positive side. Gays organized, protested, and created institutions to fight the disease. All of which offers a road map, Jackson says, for African-Americans to follow. "When white gays felt the pain, they became disruptive," he says. "They locked themselves to doors. They marched on cities. They forced mayors to act. They ran candidates for public office who had HIV. They used what we used to get the right to vote. Anything less than direct mass action will not change mass public thinking. I think it's time to march and fight and make this the centerpiece of a national health debate—for all Americans."

A "national health debate" is not a plan that many people feel they can cozy up to, however. Among African-Americans, there is a long-standing distrust of medical testing caused by rumors about the genesis of the AIDS virus as a form of genocide perpetrated by some malevolent institution. To these fears, Jackson says, "Some people just lie" about where they think they contracted the disease. "Someone will say he ate a hamburger that was made from two bulls that were gay. Let's face the issue and cut out the foolishness. Either take it on or be taken out by it," he adds. "It's past the point of philosophical debate. It's at the point of mass testing, mass direction, and mass lifesaving."

Still other taboos, like male sex in prison, "the epicenter" of the epidemic, as Jackson calls it, need serious attention if the spread of the disease is going to be halted among African-Americans. But he is not willing to relinquish an inch of the fight on this issue either. "We must look at the points we can control ourselves," he says, suggesting a movement for prison reform. "For two prisoners to be put together—one positive and one not—that is genocide and not observing [prisoners'] constitutional rights," especially if there are going to be instances of consensual or even forced sex.

Efforts to bring about any types of reforms, though, as well as spark a national movement are going to be rough in a year when media attention is focused mostly across the Atlantic on AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. The area of the world hardest hit by the disease, Africa was host in August to the 13th International AIDS Conference. Jackson does not take the media's diverted attention as a setback for his goals, though. After all, this is also a presidential election year. Finalizing his call to action "for all Americans," Jackson urges people to be sure to get out and vote in November. "But the vote must be connected to an issue," he says, looking to give all people a political cause to get them to the polls: "And while AIDS is hitting blacks hard, blacks don't have a monopoly on the disease."