Since her husband was diagnosed with HIV in 1991, more is known about the disease, but more African Americans are dying from it, Cookie Johnson told a gathering of first ladies from Chicagoland churches.
“(We)
kinda got quiet, complacent,” Johnson, wife of the former Laker’s baskeball
team star, Earvin “Magic” Johnson, said. She addressed the first ladies at a
June 17 luncheon at the Ritz-Carlton hotel downtown and urged them to do what
they could to bring the issue of HIV/AIDS awareness to their respective
congregations.
“You are
the heartbeat of the community,” Cookie Johnson said. “We can’t be quiet, we
gotta be noisy, we gotta be loud. ... It’s a totally preventable disease.”
Johnson
recalled the day her husband called her on the phone, on a day she was
preparing to watch him play basketball on TV, and said he would, instead, be
home shortly and that he had something to tell her.
Though
they had been together on and off for years, at the time, the couple had only
been married a few months when Magic Johnson arrived home and told his wife he
was HIV-positive.
“It was
devastating,” Johnson said at the luncheon, which was the first ladies annual
health event as a group. Her “world came crushing down.”
She had
also just learned that she was pregnant with the couple’s child.
At the
time of Magic Johnson’s announcement to his wife and the world of his status,
not a lot was known in the world of science and medicine about the disease.
Death was common.
But
Johnson pointed out at the luncheon that the disease doesn’t have to be a death
sentence. Education, awareness and testing are the key to preventing or
treating HIV and AIDS, she said.
Still,
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offer grim statistics for
African Americans dealing with HIV. The federal agency reports that African
Americans “face most severe burden of HIV in the United States.” Forty-six
percent of the people
diagnosed
with HIV at the end of 2007 were African American, according to the CDC.
Though
among African Americans, men accounted for 65 percent of the new infections in
2006, the new infection rate among Black women at the time was 15 times higher
than white women and four times higher than Hispanic women.
Johnson
told the first ladies she is working with the CDC to draw attention to the
disease in poor and minority communities, and help break barriers to awareness
and treatment.
As a
spokeswoman for her husbands Magic Johnson Foundation, Johnson takes the
message of HIV/AID awareness directly to women and to the Black church.
After
addressing the women at the luncheon, she spoke to the Defender.
Johnson
did not contract HIV from her husband and her baby was not born with the
disease either. Still, she told the Defender that she remains vigilant “because
our people are dying at disproportionate rates. People are dying period, and we
have to do something about it.”
That is
where the first ladies come in.
“I hope
they go back to their congregations and start HIV and AIDS ministries because
every time something (happens) ... the first place you go, you seek refuge at
your church. And if the church doesn’t want you or treats you like you’re
leprosy, then where do you have to go?” she reasoned.
Though
Johnson admits that “tradition” often gets in the way of Black faith leaders
speaking openly about the disease – once considered to be an affliction mostly
affecting homosexuals– she feels the first ladies can help to break some
barriers.
Johnson
hopes outreach efforts touch women especially, “to empower them to say no if
they’re not going to be protected ... to say I need to go get tested. I need to
take care of myself before I take care of everybody else. As Black women, we
take care of everybody else and we always put ourselves last. And if we do
that, we’re not gone be here to take care of (others).”
Copyright
2011 Chicago Defender
