“This is Black History Month, and I don’t want black people to become history,” said actress, singer, producer and activist Sheryl Lee Ralph. “We are dying too quickly from diseases that need our time, our care, our attention and our knowledge that we have it to begin with.”
For her the HIV/AIDS crisis in the African-American community has the potential to be that serious.
She saw it with her own eyes almost two generations ago.
“I was a young woman having the time of my life on Broadway in ‘Dreamgirls,’ and all of a sudden my friends just started dropping dead,” Ralph said. “Nobody was talking about it, and I thought to myself, ‘How can we all be together like a family, and then hard times hit our friends and we just act like we never knew them?’”
Ralph said the church girl in her would not let her sit and be a spectator.
So in between starring roles on stage, film and television, Ralph has used her platform as an artist to promote HIV/AIDS awareness throughout the nation.
She will be bringing her message to St. Louis as part of the Myrtle Hilliard Davis Comprehensive Health Centers’ recognition of National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day this Saturday (February 7) at Harris-Stowe State University’s Henry Givens Auditorium for “TURN UP For HIV and AIDS Prevention.”
“People talked about it when there was a large number of gay white men, but nobody said anything about the gay black men and young black women,” Ralph said.
“I was like, ‘Do you see what I see?’ I was never shocked or surprised when the disease took hold of black women. I was never shocked when it hit the black community because I had seen that from the beginning.”
On Saturday, Ralph will perform “Sometimes I Cry,” a self-written piece about the lives, loves and losses of women infected with and affected by HIV/AIDS. The performance will be followed by a Q&A session
She is founding director of The Divinely Inspired Victoriously Aware (DIVA) Foundation. The DIVA Foundation is a nonprofit organization, created as a living memorial to the many friends she has lost and because of her concern for the threat HIV/AIDS poses to women and children.
“I don’t know how many ways I can say we are important and it is necessary that we start looking after ourselves,” Ralph said. “If I can get you to see the light, then I’ve done my job. An unhealthy people are not a productive people – and they will set us aside.”
According to the 2012 City of St. Louis Department of Health Report, the HIV disease rate in the St. Louis region is 4.8 times higher in the black community (676.8 per 100,000 vs. 141.7 per 100,000 in the white community).
“We are so patient. We keep thinking that somebody is going to do it for us,” Ralph said. “I don’t know if its leftover slave mentality or whatever – but we have to remember that nobody is going to save us but us. And we must be strong, powerful and involved.”
Myrtle Hilliard Davis’ TURN UP for Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day will take place at 11 a.m. Saturday, February 7, and will also feature community leaders throughout the Greater St. Louis Area and performances by local artists as well as free testing and education at Harris-Stowe State University in the Henry Givens Building’s main auditorium, 3026 Laclede Ave.
