As Kansas City’s HIV infection rate rivals Africa’s, some black ministers admit that silence equals death

Donnie Robinson begins to speak. Fifty or so people are seated in the pews in front of him. More sit quietly in the back. Some of the kids have curled up to sleep in the pews beside their parents, reminding Robinson how he, too, dozed in pews when he was a teenager. Back then, though, he came to church only one or two months out of the year to hear the gospel music. He sat alone in the back. If he was lucky, he’d fall asleep at the end of his favorite hymn, the words I’m working on a building, it’s a true foundation in his ears, and wake up just as the preacher was finishing his sermon. He didn’t understand what the pastor was talking about anyway.

Now, at the church pulpit, he looks good, well-dressed, his dreadlocks pulled back. His angular face is handsome, save for the yellowing eyes. He’s unnervingly lean, though, because his medications are eating away his fat cells. The drugs he takes are so toxic that doctors tell him he has the insides of a 60-year-old, though he’s only 47.

“I was diagnosed with HIV 17 years ago,” Robinson tells the congregation. “Today, with God’s love, I am undetected” — meaning the number of viral particles in his bloodstream is so low that doctors don’t see them in his tests.

Behind him are three preachers — two bald, another stocky with tightly cut black hair. The bald ones are Eric Williams and Richard Prim. The other is Wallace Hartsfield Jr. (son of the well-known Kansas City minister who retired earlier this year), who will deliver the main sermon. Tonight, the night before Valentine’s Day, is the first event of the Taking It to the Pews Revival — a month of sermons at metro churches leading up to the first week in March and this year’s Good Samaritan Project
Black Church Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS. Tonight’s gathering is being held at the Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church on East Linwood.

“When I told people I had HIV, a lot of people turned their backs on me,” Robinson continues. “But that didn’t matter, because with my Father’s love I carried on, because He’s always there. But I have my questions. I wonder which way I’m supposed to go next. And I wonder: Can I ever have a child? Someday, I believe I will. And I’m worried now, because in the last few days I haven’t been feeling well.”

Robinson will give this speech again before the month is out. His testimonial is always anonymous, billed on the church bulletin as simply “From a Brother With Love.” He speaks much the same as the pastors do — eyes to the crowd, dramatic pauses, moments where he’s overcome with the emotion of his own story. When he does pause to consider his direction, listeners shout, “Amen!” and “Tell your story, brother!”

Here are the points that remain unchanged in each of his talks: Robinson was diagnosed with HIV in 1991. He kept that information from everyone but his pastor for more than seven years because he was scared that friends and family would abandon him. When he finally did reveal it, some of those friends did leave him.

Behind the lectern, Prim is one of the people shouting “Amen.” Not that long ago, he would have abandoned a man like Robinson.

Today, the 54-year-old Prim is senior pastor of the Kansas City Community Church, ministering to a membership of almost 600 people in a low, long building at 59th Street and Leavenworth Road in Kansas City, Kansas. When the church bought the property, under Prim’s direction in 1998, it was a deserted bowling alley. Services are loud and joyful, though, with Prim serving in the boisterous tradition of Baptist ministers and pews full of people shouting responses to his calls.

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Prim started his theological career with the goal of modernizing the church he would lead. He’d worked as a technical writer for IBM in the late 1970s, putting together user manuals. He took a five-year leave of absence to try preaching, and graduated from Indiana Christian University in 1981. He never went back to IBM.

“Everything around us was becoming modern and updated, but the church wasn’t,” he says. “I wanted to change that.”

He took the pastor’s job at Kansas City Community Church in 1986, when the church had a membership of just 28 families. He studied urban development and learned how to take advantage of government funds to improve his church’s resources. He started housing redevelopment programs and tried to use his position to create jobs, stimulate neighborhood revitalization and start education programs.

“We were trying to help all these people that were underemployed or hated their jobs,” he recalls. “We were convinced quality of life was tied to quality of education, so we tried to help people improve the tools they brought to the table.”

While the rest of the nation was becoming aware of AIDS, Kansas City escaped much of the devastation caused by the disease in large urban areas, partly because the most popular drugs in the metro at the time didn’t involve needles, according to Greg Stephenson, who oversees the HIV/STD program at the
Wyandotte County Health Department.

“I had no idea about HIV/AIDS until probably about the mid-’90s,” Prim says. “What I learned then was that it was a disease for gay, white males.”

He decided it was God’s punishment for sinners.

“I stood at the pulpit, and I preached that scripture presented certain lifestyles as sins and that we were the recipients of HIV/AIDS because of the sins we were committing,” he says. “I was a great trumpeter in that cause.”

Things went well for Prim’s church. As he stayed, the membership grew.

Soon, though, Prim noticed a disturbing new trend. More and more young men were dying, each with the cause of death listed as “respiratory disorder.” Their families kept quiet about the deaths, but when they asked Prim to minister to the dying, it was never much of a secret that the respiratory problems were the result of an HIV infection. He knew many people whose relatives died alone, ashamed of their diagnosis.

In the late 1990s, Prim got a call from an older church member who asked him to come to St. Luke’s hospital.

There, in a hospital bed, Prim found a man in his mid-20s. He’d lived in New York City until a few weeks earlier, when he came home to Kansas City to die. In New York, he’d worked as an accountant during the day and pursued a career as a dancer in his off hours. Communication was difficult because his body had wasted away. When he did speak, he didn’t talk about his illness, but he made it clear he was ready for the end.

“I remember the family in agony of not being able to tell the real reason or the cause of the sickness, or whispering very quietly so as not to disclose the information,” Prim says. “He’d seemingly had a very successful, short life. He’d had a lot of accomplishments. But I don’t think even at this point I was examining my thoughts on this. I was probably thinking to myself, You got this disease because of your lifestyle.”

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People who are keeping track of Kansas City’s HIV infection rate are alarmed at how much it has risen over the past five years. It’s been growing so quickly that it rivals the most heavily infected regions in the world.

In fact, the rate of new infections per capita in Jackson County over a four-year period rivaled that of sub-Saharan Africa, says Paul Showalter, the Good Samaritan Project’s director of development.

“The HIV infection data I saw showed cases climbing so much from 2002 to 2006,” Showalter says. The Kansas City, Missouri, Health Department reported a total of 798 new cases in Jackson County during those years, with an average annual increase of 14.25 percent. If that rate continues, the number of HIV cases in the county will double every five years.

More than two-thirds of those newly infected with HIV are minorities.

Outside of churches, Robinson does most of his HIV awareness work through the Good Samaritan Project, where he works as a community prevention specialist, giving talks in schools and anywhere else where people have questions about HIV.

Most of the people who seek help from Good Samaritan are gay men, who come to the organization for services such as mental-health counseling, case management, transportation and back-to-work support. But staffers there also see prostitutes, heterosexual women and children.

Showalter mentions the case of a 15-year-old boy who got tested as a joke while tagging along with his cousin for a checkup at their closest health-department clinic. He was too scared to tell his family that his results had come back positive. But a day after Robinson spoke at his school, the boy contacted the project and asked for Robinson. Showalter says the people at the Good Samaritan Project are still the only ones who know the kid tested positive.

“There are a bunch of little dudes out there that are actually my sons,” Robinson says of the young men he has come to know through the project. “There are parents that accepted me as a role model, and it was cool. And I keep in touch with them, and they know if they need to talk they can always come to me. I’m a family man. I love my family.”

But Robinson knows that for every kid who comes to the GSP for help, there’s another who’s keeping his diagnosis to himself.

And when Robinson preaches about his own experience with AIDS in Kansas City’s black churches, it’s an effort to reach people who are at higher risk for infection but have been unable to talk about it because of longstanding prejudices, some of which were advanced by their own ministers.

While Prim was building his church, Robinson was in prison, doing seven and a half years of a 15-year sentence. Robinson won’t discuss the crime he committed except to say it was a Class A felony. “A lot of other people mixed up in that,” he says. “I can’t talk about it.” He was released in March 1992 and completed his parole in June 1996.

In a way, he felt safe in prison. He never heard the word AIDS until after he was locked up. Along with gangbanging and crack cocaine, it was one of those mid-’80s issues taking up the first few minutes of the nightly news while he spent time in a cell.

Sometimes, social workers would take troubled junior high or high school kids to meet with prisoners. Robinson would talk to them about the choices they were making. Seeing the kids reminded him of his own childhood. His dad hadn’t been around. His mother worked as a seamstress to support him. He was angry most of the time, and when he was old enough, he started drinking, doing what drugs he could and spending time at clubs.

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“I wanted to find a way to give young men the role model I didn’t have growing up,” he says. “I wanted them to know someone would care about them, because I didn’t have that.”

After he got out of prison, the Missouri Department of Corrections put him up in a dormitory-style room at the Kansas City Community Release Center at 651 Mulberry, a halfway house. He had a top bunk and shared the room and one bathroom with two other men.

Every former inmate is given a physical examination. Three days after he arrived at the center, Robinson was called from his dorm to the Kansas City, Missouri, Health Department at the corner of 19th Street and Holmes.

In the waiting room, he laughed about it. Didn’t these fools know he’d been locked up, safely away from the problem? He was still chuckling when he went to see the doctor in a room where dust covered the windowpanes. Then he heard his diagnosis.

“I done had pistols pulled on me. I been in car accidents. I never felt as afraid as I did then,” he says. “All I saw was three months in front of me. Things weren’t advanced then. No one who got this diagnosis lived past three months.”

He couldn’t stop crying. By the time he left the office, his face was so swollen from tears that he didn’t want to take the bus. So he walked back to the center.

Back in his room, he barricaded the door so his roommates wouldn’t walk in on him crying. Then he crawled onto the top bunk and lay there with his arms folded over his chest, praying. He figured he’d been infected before he went to prison and just never knew.

He spent the next week talking to God. He prayed on the bus, which he took to jobs moving boxes around warehouses. He prayed whenever he walked anywhere. He prayed in his bed. He spent six more months in the center with his roommates, never saying a word about his infection. As soon as he was released, he got in touch with the social workers who had taken the young men into his prison, and he began volunteering for agencies that helped unfortunate children.

“I got involved in everyone else’s problems. That way, I didn’t have to think about mine,” Robinson says. “And I kept it to myself for seven and a half years.”

He moved in with his mother. Before he went to prison, she’d seen him as a troubled young man, though she never turned him out. Shortly after arriving in her home, he got sick with what appeared to be the flu. She went to the store and brought back juice and over-the-counter medicine. While she was at work, he passed the time trying to keep his eyes open, worried that if he fell asleep, she’d come back and find him dead.

In 1993 he joined the Palestine Missionary Baptist Church at 3619 East 35th Street, where the Rev. Earl Abel became his spiritual mentor. Before Abel’s death in 2005, he became a father figure for Robinson. One day, the two met in the church hallway. Robinson had been eating potato chips, and he started to wipe the crumbs off his shirt before they shook hands. Abel stopped him. “He said, ‘Don’t ever do that. Just give me your hand,'” Robinson recalls. “And something like that meant a lot to me.”

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Still, Robinson kept his diagnosis to himself.

He got sick again in 1999. This time, he was living alone. He managed to get to a store and buy a bottle of NyQuil. Then he spent the next three days in bed, alone, waiting to see what happened. How’s your mother going to feel if you die from this and she didn’t even know you had it? he recalls wondering.

He went to Abel’s office. Behind a closed door, the two prayed together. Then Robinson told him. “There wasn’t any trying to find the right words. It just came out,” he says. “He wasn’t the type of man to give you advice. He’d just tell you to pray. The scriptures he led me to were always the ones I needed to know.”

Robinson wouldn’t have to wait long before telling his mother. It was time to renew his medical insurance, which was in her name. After the insurance representative came to her house to update the information, Robinson sat her down.

“I told her I probably wouldn’t get it renewed because of my status, and then she knew,” he says. “And she was always a strong woman, so she didn’t show any pain, but it was there. And she was like, ‘OK, you should have told me earlier. We could have worked things out. But it’s OK, and we’ll get through this.'”

Now he could open up to others without worrying. But not everyone was as accepting.

“I had a lot of backs turned on me,” Robinson says.

Fifteen years ago, the Rev. Eric Williams was one of the only black pastors in Kansas City who would perform funeral services for people who had died of AIDS-related illnesses. His church, Calvary Temple Baptist at 29th Street and Holmes, was one of the first three churches in the metro to participate in local events for the national Black Church Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS. The idea was to increase HIV awareness in the hopes of preventing its spread — and call out the church’s role as African-Americans (especially women) were becoming disproportionately affected. Williams encouraged his congregation to get tested for HIV.

“When we started it was us, Longview United Methodist and St. James United Methodist,” Williams says of Kansas City’s first Black Church Week of Prayer in 1996. “It’s been very slow growth. I’ve done personal outreach to pastors and congregations, and some flat-out turned us down. To be fair, churches are asked to be involved in everything from blood donations to diabetes. The unique thing about churches is, God gives us each an area that we’re good at. But I think this needs to be on the palette of services we all provide.”

Out of nearly 500 black churches in the metro, only 12 partnered for the Taking It to the Pews Revival, with roughly twice that many involved in the week of prayer for AIDS victims that followed. Running from February to March as a lead-in to the prayer week, Taking It to the Pews was conceived as a way to speak about HIV directly to church congregations and help overcome some of the stigma surrounding the virus.

Prim stands out as one of the few preachers to have been converted.

“I’m ashamed to say it was only a few years ago that I really accepted a new way of thinking about it,” Prim says. “That was my failure as a man of God, out of my ignorance. How are people in alternative lifestyles going to hear the word if they’re scared to even come into the church? Who else is going to tell them? If I’m supposed to be a light, what’s the good unless I’m shining in the dark?”

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Two years ago, Prim’s wife, Carolyn, started work as an HIV awareness trainer for the Red Cross. She’d worked in health services before taking the Red Cross job, and she and her husband had talked about HIV. She would always argue that it wasn’t a sin but a disease and should be treated as such.

“It wasn’t that he didn’t care, but we didn’t know anybody with the virus and didn’t do any research into it. It just wasn’t in our circle,” Carolyn says. “To me, after those talks, it was like he immediately started to change his thinking.”

Two years ago, he stood up in front of his congregation and offered a full apology.

Afterward, he figured that some people were glad to hear it and others would say he should’ve kept his mouth shut.

Just because Prim has changed his mind about HIV doesn’t mean he’s going to change his preaching about safe-sex practices — which he opposes because he preaches abstinence until marriage. He refuses to mention condoms in a sermon because, he says, he doubts that “one piece of plastic is going to save you.”

Prim says he knows he won’t be invited to preach in some churches again.

“Other clergy have not necessarily embraced this doctrine, so we’ve got to try and establish some commonality with them, some sort of mutual understanding,” Prim says. “Because it’s going to get to the point very soon, if it hasn’t already, where there’s not going to be a single congregation that doesn’t have someone there, at the service, who’s HIV-positive.”

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The week after Robinson’s talk at Metropolitan Missionary Baptist, his fears about his health turn out to be well-founded. He calls in to work and spends the next week sick at home. He’s had only four serious periods of illness since his diagnosis, with each following the same weeklong pattern: three days of illness and two to recover his strength.

Wednesday night, March 6, he’s back in the pulpit, this time at St. Monica’s Catholic Church at East 16th Street and Paseo. He’s finishing up another testimonial, and once again, the congregation is shouting amens, telling him to keep preaching.

“People keep telling me to get over this and live my life, and I hate it when they do that,” he tells the congregation. “I understand that to some people, they’re trying to be strong, and to them that means acting like things don’t hurt you and just pushing them away. How am I supposed to get over it when every day I look at myself and I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be here? Don’t ever tell me to get over it.”

He leaves the altar, and those in the front pews stand to embrace him. Prim is already taking his place behind the microphone. He’s in a dark suit with a black shirt; his gold necklace sparkles under the lights. As with each sermon Prim has delivered at Taking It to the Pews Revival services over the past month, he starts with an apology for the church’s dismissive attitude toward people with HIV and AIDS.

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Prim announces he’s going to show everyone how simple it is to get an HIV test. A tester from Good Samaritan comes up with a long cotton swab.

“So we’re going to do collection, and you can come up and see me do it and how easy it is,” Prim tells the congregation. “I’ll tell you, too, I went to Catholic schools, and we never had a choir like this. Amen!”

The choir starts singing, and people line up to walk before the altar and put their offerings in a wicker basket. Prim rolls the swab against his cheek and claps along with the choir.

Three minutes later, he hands the swab back to the tester. “She’s going to be in the back, so anyone that wants to get tested tonight, please go and do it,” he says. “All of the tests are strictly confidential.”

On a chilly but bright Saturday morning in mid-March, Williams is behind the wheel of his car on Swope Parkway, eagerly waiting to see what kind of crowd will show up for his parade.

It’s a New Orleans-style funeral procession that Williams hopes will dramatize the loss of loved ones in black churches and homes.

In the front is a carriage drawn by a black horse. Behind that, pallbearers carry two coffins. Williams is behind them. Representatives from almost all of the churches that participated in the Week of Prayer make up the bulk of the procession. Farther back is the Schlagle High School Marching Band, followed by personalities from radio stations, members of the Black Health Care Coalition, fraternity brothers and sorority sisters. With police officers directing traffic, the parade sets off from Swope Parkway Church of Christ, near 56th Street and Swope Parkway, heading south to a block party at 6430 Swope Parkway.

Williams smiles and opens his sunroof. He turns on some gospel music — a song called “We Shall Recover.” They aren’t very far into the mile-long route before Williams realizes that no one is out on the streets watching.

“In some neighborhoods, you can only make so much noise, but I know they heard it, whether they liked it or not,” he’ll say later. “In some midtown neighborhoods, the neighbors don’t hear a lot of street gatherings unless they’re up to no good.”

The procession continues down empty streets a while longer, and then Williams sees kids from the back of the parade running across the lawns. Oh, no, don’t go to people’s houses, he thinks. I don’t want people getting hurt.

Before anyone can stop them, the kids knock on the front door of a house. A gray-haired woman in a housedress answers. The kids hand her some prayer beads, and she starts to smile. Then they wave goodbye and go on to the next house.

“They were asking people to protect themselves and people were listening,” Williams later explains.

The parade continues, with the kids running ahead. Traffic backs up for blocks behind it while the marching band bangs on its drums and dances.

Since then, Williams says 10 churches have contacted him asking to get involved with next year’s Taking It to the Pews Revival, but no one has officially signed on. Angela Williams, Good Samaritan’s director of prevention, says she has seen no increase in the number of people coming in to get tested.

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