Rae Lewis-Thornton 1962–

AIDS activist

Worked on Political Campaigns

Went Public About AIDS

Health Declined then Improved

Sources

Even in the years when she was quite ill from AIDS (Acquired Immunity Deficiency Syndrome), Rae Lewis-Thornton still visited high schools and colleges, educating young people about the disease. On her visits to college campuses, several years after her life-threatening bouts with Pneumocystis pneumonia, she would run into students who had heard her speak when they were in high school. Some of them would say to her, “Rae, you told us that you were going to be dead by this time.” As she told Contemporary Black Biography, she would respond by saying “You know what, I should have died, but by the presence of God, I’m still here.”

Having AIDS was not the first obstacle that Lewis-Thornton had faced in life. She was born prematurely in Chicago to two drug-addicted parents in 1962. When she was an infant, her paternal grandfather took her from her parents and raised her. By the time she was three, her father had been killed. She had no contact with her birth mother until she was 18. Lewis-Thornton began her schooling in Chicago at Beethoven and Earle schools, but transferred to Chute Middle School when her grandfather and his wife moved to Evanston, Illinois. In high school, her living circumstances changed again. In the beginning of her senior year, she returned home one night 15 minutes after curfew, and her grandfather’s wife kicked her out.

Lewis-Thornton found a place to live in Chicago with a friend, and for the rest of her senior year commuted an hour each morning to Evanston High School on the train, went to two jobs after school, and then late in the evening, got back on the “EL” to travel back to her south side apartment. Despite the challenges, she graduated with her class, and after taking a year off after high school to work and earn some money, began college at Southern Illinois University.

Worked on Political Campaigns

It was during her two years at Southern Illinois that her involvement in politics began. One day a fellow student stopped her and asked her to join the Black Affairs Council. Soon she was heavily involved in Harold Washington’s race for mayor of Chicago. She organized 350 students to travel to Chicago and work as campaign workers the day of the election. She also began a chapter of the Free South Africa Movement on campus. Her leadership in the Washington campaign led to her involvement with Operation Push, and she got a position with them the next summer as an intern.

Lewis-Thornton realized that she was a good organizer; at the same time, she was finding causes that she felt passionately about and wanted to spend more time on. The next year, instead of returning to college, she moved to Washington, D.C., to work on Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign as his deputy national youth director. After working in the congressional office of Barbara Mikulski, and on Mikulski’s bid for a senate office, she went to work for the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy.

In 1985, after an Amtrak accident in Virginia, Lewis-Thornton read in the newspapers that there was a

At a Glance…

Born Rae Lewis on May 22, 1962 to Alfred Henry Lewis Jr. and Judith Lewis; raised by Alfred Henry Lewis Sr. and Georgia Lewis. Education; Attended Southern Illinois University; Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, magna cum laude, political science, 1991; University of Illinois, Chicago, grad studies; McCormick Theological Seminary, attending, 2000.

Career: Deputy national youth director for Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign, 1984, national youth director, 1988; worked on senatorial campaigns for Barbara Mikulski and Carol Mosley Braun; AIDS advocate and a motivational speaker, addressing high school and college audiences and African-American audiences, 1993–; licensed as a Baptist minister in July, 2000 by Rev. Clay Evans and preached her inaugural sermon at Fellowship Baptist Church, Chicago.

Awards: Chicago Emmy for “Living with AIDS,” Channel 2, 1995.

Member: Delta Sigma Theta Sorority; Leadership Board, Core Center.

Address: 1507 East 53rd Street, Suite 315, Chicago, IL, 60615, Website —www.raelewisthornton.org

national shortage of blood donations due to concerns about AIDS, so she organized a blood drive at her office. Six months later, she got a letter from the Red Cross asking her to come in and discuss a health matter with them. The Red Cross worker told her that the blood she had donated in her blood drive had been tested and she was HIV positive. Lewis-Thornton was stunned: she had not engaged in any of the high-risk behaviors for AIDS; she had never used intravenous drugs, and, although she was sexually active, she had only dated educated, respectable men. Later that night she told the man that she had been seeing for the last three months, a young minister; he cursed her, grabbed his things, and never contacted her again.

Her reaction the day she learned of her HIV status became her pattern for the next six years: she threw herself into her work and tried to ignore her condition. Her HIV status became a secret she did not share with anybody. Outwardly, her life had not changed, except that once every six months, she would go to a clinic to get her t-cell count (an indicator of the strength of her immune system) checked.

When Jackson mounted a second bid for the presidency in 1987, Lewis-Thornton worked on the campaign as his national youth director. After the elections were over, she decided it was time for her to finish college. She enrolled in Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago as a political science major, and as she described it, went on the fast track. Starting with 12 hours of credit from her year at Southern, she completed her studies in record time, graduating magna cum laude with a major in political science in the spring of 1991. She began graduate school at the University of Illinois at Chicago the following fall, and took on the job of advance coordinator for Carol Moseley Braun’s bid for the senate.

Went Public About AIDS

Lewis-Thornton had continued to get her t-cell count checked every six months. In 1992 her t-cells dropped dramatically, and she was told that she now had full-blown AIDS. Breaking her longstanding silence, she began the difficult task of telling her family and friends. A teacher at Bowen High School in Chicago asked her to come to talk to her students about what it was like to live with AIDS. Despite the fact that she had no experience in public speaking, Lewis-Thornton agreed. She gave a series of workshops for the students, and the effect was dramatic. She spoke with absolute candor about HIV and AIDS. Students really listened to her message, and Lewis-Thornton realized that she had a gift for communicating to young people. She decided that speaking out about AIDS to teens was what God wanted her to do. At the time, she was again working as a political organizer, but she quit her job to do public speaking full time, fully confident that it would work out. And it did—her calendar was soon full of speaking engagements at high schools and colleges around the country.

Lewis-Thornton’s message to her audiences was blunt: if they believed that they were immune from exposure to AIDS because they were young, well-dressed and educated, or because they were Christian, or because they had never used drugs, or were heterosexual, or did not sleep around, then she was witness to the fact that they were wrong, because all those things were true of her, and she still contracted AIDS. She warned her audiences that they were responsible for protecting themselves from AIDS. That meant always using a condom when they had sex, no matter how attractive and middle-class their partner seemed. As she told Jet, “People still don’t know what AIDS looks like … The face of AIDS is not always a visible face.”

Part of her impact as an AIDS activist was the fact that she was an African-American woman. In the United States, 52% of all AIDS victims are African-American women, and AIDS is the primary cause of death among African Americans between the ages of 18 and 44. Lewis-Thornton’s audiences were especially vulnerable: more than half of the AIDS cases among teenagers are African-American teens. In an interview on Nightline, Lewis-Thornton said that a contributing factor was the African-American community’s attitude towards AIDS, stating “The African-American community is in denial about the impact of HIV. We are a very conservative community on issues related to sexuality and drugs. As a result, we haven’t responded well.” She attributed this to the fact that most African Americans with AIDS hide their status, and that allows others to think of AIDS as a disease that happens outside of their community. She often quoted an African proverb in her talks, “He who conceals his disease cannot be cured.” Lewis-Thornton called for Black churches to establish AIDS ministries and for people who were HIV positive to talk openly and candidly with young people about sex.

Lewis-Thornton’s story was also getting out in the media. In December of 1994, Essence magazine did a cover story on her; a few months later, Ebony also featured her in a major story. CBS in Chicago hired her to do an eight-part series on living with AIDS as part of the nightly news. This series had a major impact on AIDS awareness in Chicago, and won an Emmy for Lewis-Thornton and the station. Another major development in her life was her marriage, in August of 1994, to Kenneth Thornton, who was fully aware of her health status.

Health Declined then Improved

At the same time that her story was impacting thousands, Lewis-Thornton’s health was declining sharply. A normal person’s t-cell count is around a thousand; in 1996, Lewis-Thornton’s plummeted to eight. She had several bouts with Pneumocystis pneumonia in 1996 and 1997, a sign that her immune system was losing its ability to fight off infections. She lost weight, going from her usual size of 10 or 12 to a size two. She began to tell her high school audiences that by the time they reached college, she would be dead.

Then, in 1998, her doctor put her on a new regimen of AIDS drugs, and Lewis-Thornton’s health slowly began to improve. Ironically, as her health improved, her marriage faltered, and she and her husband separated and later divorced. Lewis-Thornton’s assessment was that her husband had married her with a commitment to taking care of her until she died, and when the scenario changed he did not know how to deal with a person who might live. Lewis-Thornton admitted that she also had trouble adjusting to the change in her health status. In her interview with CBB, she said “I am starting to prepare a future for myself as if I’m going to live from here to eternity. If I die in the process, then I do die. But it’s a different paradigm from where I was 6 years ago when I was preparing for death.”

One new direction in her life was the decision to become a minister. She became licensed by Reverend Clay Evans as a Baptist minister in July of 2000, preaching her first sermon at Fellowship Baptist Church in Chicago. Then, in order to become an ordained minister, one who could marry people and preside at funerals as well as preach, she entered McCormick Theological Seminary to study for a divinity degree. Lewis-Thornton does not view her life up to this point as a tragedy as others might, but as preparation for her future ministry. She believes that she has been given the gift of perseverance, and she wants to share that gift with others who have been challenged by life, whether by AIDS or in other ways, especially those who have been left out or locked out of the church. As Lewis-Thornton told Ebony, “I want people to say, ‘She took the adversities in her life and she used them for the goodness of God.’”

Sources

Periodicals

Chicago Tribune, June 11, 1995, WomanNews, p. 3.

Ebony, June 1995, pp. 122–126.

Emerge. March 1997, pp. 57–62.

Essence, December 1994, pp. 62–64 and December 1996, p. 65.

Jet., February 14, 2000, p. 51.

Lifeline, April/May 2001.

Washington Post, July 22, 1995, pp. C1–C4.

Other

Additional information was obtained from a transcript of interview on Nightline, May 20, 1996 (http://abcnews.com) and a personal interview with Contemporary Black Biography on December 3, 2001.

—Rory Donnelly