Hello Beauties!
Today is going to be part one of a two part post on two activists who are truly an inspiration. I hope you enjoy reading about them as much as I did!
Rae Lewis-Thornton is an AIDS activist and public speaker. She was born in Chicago to two heroin addicted parents, and was raised by an abusive grandmother from the age of three. Despite her circumstances, she attended Southern Illinois University, and graduated from Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago magna cum laude. While attending Southern Illinois University, she became active in politics, eventually leaving the school to move to Washington D.C. and work as Jesses Jackson's deputy national youth director during his first presidential run.
Rae had it all. She was young, successful, and had a great job that she was passionate about. Then things took a turn. In 1986, after donating blood due to a shortage in Virginia, Rae was told that she was HIV positive. She was stunned: she did not participate in high risk behavior, did not use drugs, and dated educated and respectable men. The minster she was seeing at the time, a minster, cursed her upon hearing the news and left, never to be heard from again.
For six years, she concentrated on work and tried to ignore her condition. She kept her status a secret from everyone, and for the most part, her life did not change besides the semi-annual visits to the doctor to keep track of her T cell count. However, in 1992, her T cell level dropped dramatically; she now had full blown AIDS. She began the task of telling her friends and family. The same year, a teacher at Bowen High School in Chicago asked her to come and talk to the students about living with AIDS. She had no experience in public speaking, but the effect was dramatic. Her candor about HIV and AIDS made students really listen to her message, and because of this, she realized she had a gift for getting through to these young people. She decided that speaking about AIDS to teens is what God had ordained for her. She was working as a political organizer at the time, but quit to speak full time. Her calendar was soon full of engagements at high schools and colleges around the country.
Rae is very blunt with her audiences: if they thought that just because they were straight, or well educated, or never used drugs, or didn't sleep around, they wouldn't contract AIDS, they were wrong. She herself was educated, straight, had never done drugs, did not sleep around and she still contracted it. She preached safe sex, and reminded her audience that they themselves were responsible for protecting themselves. As she said in an interview with Jet magazine, "People still don't know what AIDS looks like. The face of AIDS is not always a visible face." "Black heterosexuals, in particular, are not confronting the disease realistically," she stated in an interview with Ebony. "African-Americans are still living in some kind of dream world when it comes to AIDS."
At the same time that her story was reaching thousands, Ms. Lewis-Thornton's health was declining sharply. For example, a healthy person's T cell count is around a thousand, in 1996 hers was 8. She battled with pneumocystis pneumonia in '96-'97, a sign that her immune system was losing the ability to fight off infections. She began losing weight, going from her usual size 10 to a size 2. She began telling her audiences in the high schools she spoke at that by the time they reached college, she would be dead.
However, with new drugs becoming available as more was learned about the disease, her doctor put her on a new regimen of drugs, and she slowly began to improve. She became a minister, receiving license by Reverend Clay Evans in July 2000, and preached her first sermon at Fellowship Baptist Church in Chicago.
Today, Rae is busy working on her line of bracelets named the RLT Collection, and continues to speak out about HIV/AIDS in the black community. She is truly and inspiration to women all over, whether they are HIV positive or not.
You can stay up with Rae Lewis-Thornton's goings on on Twitter (twitter.com/raelt), Myspace (myspace.com/raelewisthornton) and Facebook.
Stay tuned for part 2, where we look at the life of Reverend Stacey Latimer, a HIV-positive minister who is open about his relationships with men. Be blessed!
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