The Secret Plot to Destroy African Americans
From virus carrying mosquitoes to government biological warfare, the community is clamoring with theories about why blacks are hit harder by AIDS-and what to do about it.

On December 19, 1998, a month after President Clinton declared AIDS a crisis in black America -- a hard-won concession by the Congressional Black Caucus and a handful of determined African-American advocates -- Reverend Al Sharpton and a dirty dozen of community activists assembled for an AIDS assault of a different kind in Harlem.

They were responding to the same crazy reality: African Americans, who constitute only 13 percent of the U.S. population, then made up 32 percent of PWAs, a ratio that crept to 33 percent in 1999. But unlike Mario Cooper, whose Leading for Life campaign twisted the arms of African-American leaders to take on AIDS, or Maxine Waters, the empathetic Caucus chair who led the charge on Capitol Hill, Sharpton’s six-hour-long meeting took aim at the reeling statistics with a whirlwind of theories. These theories, about why exactly AIDS shows such a strange affinity for blacks, have been blowing across America for more than 10 years now, stoking fires that no one’s figured out how to put out.

One burning voice belongs to Boyd Ed Graves. Sitting at a well-polished dining room table at his home in Cleveland’s black, solidly middle-class Mount Pleasant neighborhood, Graves offers an explanation for those numbers: genocide, plain and simple. In fact, he’s suing the U.S. government for using tax dollars to secretly develop HIV in a lab and then deploy it as a biological weapon to kill blacks. It’s ethnic cleansing, he says, and in the end not a single black soul will remain.

For the record, Graves, who was diagnosed with HIV in 1992 (and now has an undetectable viral load on HAART), concedes it’s possible that he contracted the virus through unprotected sex. But more likely, he believes, he was the victim of a stealth dart gun, a “micro-bio- inoculator” that can tag unsuspecting victims from 100 feet away without so much as a prick, a product of the U.S. government’s biological warfare program. Or, he imagines, he may have been one of thousands of unlucky African Americans infected through a bite by a virus-distributing mosquito bred by government contractors at an island facility off the shores of Manhattan. Or: “The HIV virus is the result of a century-long hunt for a contagious cancer that selectively kills.” “If they didn’t want me to discover the true origins of AIDS,” Graves says, cutting a glare in my direction, “they shouldn’t have given it to me.”

Graves has an encyclopedic mind. He can pull numbers out of the air from reports he read 20 years ago. In 1976, he says, the U.S. Navy deemed him so competent that during his duty as a cryptography officer, he was one of only a few aboard the guided-missile destroyer on which he worked who were privy to nuclear launch codes. Later, Graves graduated from Ohio Northern University law school with honors.

His case against the government stemmed from a discrimination suit he filed against his first employer out of law school, a federally funded agency serving the disabled, which laid him off in 1995 shortly after he disclosed his HIV status. That suit was settled out of court for $48,000, he tells me, but in the process of building his extensive argument, Graves uncovered a document that would spark a lifelong obsession. It was the transcript of a 1970 Congressional hearing on defense appropriations during which a certain Dr. Donald MacArthur of the Pentagon mentioned a “biological agent...for which no natural immunity could be acquired...that could be developed within 5 to 10 years.” That document was soon joined by hundreds of others to form the basis of Boyd Graves vs. the President of the United States, which Graves filed in federal court last January.

He pulls out a copy of the MacArthur transcript for me and begins reading highlights, then stops himself midsentence and looks up. “Do you want to hear me read it in my Nixon voice?” he asks. Nixon, I’ll soon discover, is just one of Graves’ dozen impersonations. He also does the hostile AIDS outreach worker, the annoyed relative and the impatient bureaucrat, all of whom he’s encountered on his hell-bent mission and whose voices repeat inside his head.

A district court, calling his name claims regarding the transmission of HIV “completely baseless and delusional,” threw his case a month after after it was filed. But Graves continues to appeal, in March, a higher court granted a review.

Among Cleveland’s AIDS leadership, Graves has earned a nickname: Crazy Eddie. He has spread his gospel to every AIDS agency in this Corn Belt town; he’s caused such a stir that some compare his impact in the Midwest to that of ACT UP/San Francisco AIDS dissidents in the West. Jon Darr Bradshaw, executive director of the Xchange Point, a program that does street outreach in Cleveland’s toughest neighborhoods, says that Graves’ theories have created such doubt among his clients that some have begun refusing condoms and clean needles, suspicious that the supplies are tainted with HIV.Such incidents have only earned Graves more credibility in the eyes of some African Americans. Last March, he was named one of the 25 most influential people in Cleveland by Cleveland Life, Ohio’s largest African-American newspaper. That followed a December 1999 editorial by the paper’s then-news editor, Daniel Gray-Kontar, in which he wrote: “Is what Boyd Ed Graves saying accurate? I would respond with another question: If we would have been told about the experiments with blacks in Tuskegee with the syphilis virus, would we have believed the crier then?”

The long history of slavery and Jim Crow set the stage for African Americans to suspect an AIDS conspiracy, and, for many, evidence of other plots clinches the case. Two episodes famously surfaced in the 1970s: Tuskegee, where government researchers withheld syphilis meds from unsuspecting black southerners, and COINTELPRO, an FBI program that surveilled and harassed black radicals. Equally disturbing facts came out in an August 1996 piece, later partly retracted, which suggested a CIA role in allowing crack to be sold in LA’s South Central to profit Nicaraguan contras. A June 1998 San Jose Mercury NewsLos Angeles Times article documented germ-warfare techniques planned against South African revolutionaries, including Nelson Mandela.

As one woman said at an LA town meeting convened by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) after the Mercury News piece ran, “Black men are in jail for selling drugs the CIA brought to our community the same way they brought the guns here for us to kill each other. If they don’t get you that way, government doctors will stick you with AIDS. One way or another they’ll destroy us.”

The sister’s not alone in her thinking. According to a 1999 study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), one out of four African Americans surveyed said that they believed HIV was created by the U.S. government to eliminate blacks. That study echoed the findings of an earlier one by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which found that 54 percent of blacks surveyed viewed HIV testing as a ploy to infect them with the virus. Look at those numbers and the truth stares back: Belief in conspiracies is far from fringe.

Just stroll into an Afrocentric bookstore in any of America’s urban centers and you’ll find plenty of reading to reinforce even the slightest doubts about HIV, from white right-winger William Campbell Douglass’ AIDS: The End of Civilization to black agitator Curtis Cost’s Vaccines Are Dangerous: A Warning to the Black Community, which argues that HIV is a man-made biological weapon created to wipe out blacks. Cost’s 1991 book is still a steady seller, recommended by the Universal Zulu Nation, a 12-city hip hop fraternity that discourages condom use and claims that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. Recently, Cost did a complete 180 on HIV. As his latest, unpublished book will show, the Bronx resident tells me, “There’s no such thing as AIDS,” and we’re all dupes of a misinformation campaign.

Cost, as a new AIDS dissident, was a key organizer of that well-attended December 1998 Harlem AIDS forum convened by Rev. Sharpton. There, Phillip Valentine, a self-described “natural healer,” who believes blacks should abstain from all meds, even herbs, shared the podium with a dozen speakers, only one of whom thought HIV caused AIDS -- and that speaker argued that the virus had been intentionally transmitted to blacks through World Health Organization vaccine programs. Later, during an animated conversation, Valentine told me that it’s the medicine, not the virus, that kills: “The only time you start getting sick is when you go to see a doctor.” Valentine advises HIVers to stay away from meds under any circumstance. When a newly diagnosed friend of Valentine’s called him in tears seeking advice, Valentine invited him over with his bag of prescriptions. “I asked ’What did they give you?’ He named all the drugs. We prayed. After a brief ritual, I helped him pour them down the toilet.”

While Graves, Valentine and Cost peddle their conspiracies on the ground, prominent African Americans have validated these ideas from the airwaves. Nation of Islam (NOI) head Louis Farrakhan has long maintained that AIDS was made in a government lab just outside Virginia, a message he spreads through his speeches and the NOI’s organ, The Final Call. Several black entertainers have endorsed these views as well. In a 1990 appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show, rapper Kool Moe Dee stated that he thought AIDS was a part of a “clean up America campaign” intended to hit gays and minorities. Director Spike Lee seconded the notion in November 1991 in Rolling Stone, and in an October 1992 interview on CNN, media giant Bill Cosby said he thought AIDS was “man-made” and that “if it wasn’t created to get rid of black folks, it sure likes us a lot.” Though statements like these are less common of late, megastar Will Smith speculated in the July 1999 Vanity Fair that “possibly AIDS was created as a result of biological-warfare testing.” These messages leave many African Americans caught in a life-or-death struggle between advice from their doctor and words from public figures they respect.

Forty miles northeast of Montgomery, Alabama, where Rosa Parks touched off the civil rights movement, lies a town whose very name has come to symbolize government malevolence: Tuskegee. I took a trip down to the scene of the crime last May, on the occasion of an AIDS training for black church leaders, to see with my own eyes the rooms where federal researchers watched, probed and tested 399 African American men as many slowly died, untreated and uninformed, from syphilis. The windows at the old John A. Andrew Hospital were broken and boarded. I came upon an open side entrance and, once inside, found retired medical equipment, a wall calendar that had collected dust since 1958 and, everywhere, the buzzing of hornets. Standing in a dim corridor, I tried to imagine 1932, back when the hospital was busy with black men waiting in chairs for treatment they never got. After 40 years, the study was finally halted and the hospital eventually closed, but somehow, standing in that place, the men’s fears and misplaced hopes lingered.


A. Cornelius Baker, the African-American executive director of the Whitman-Walker Clinic in Washington, DC took the matter so seriously that he campaigned to make President Clinton apologize for Tuskegee, which he did in May 1997. “There was no way to have an honest discussion in the black community about HIV if that experiment was not addressed,” Baker says. “But, at some point, the real issue isn’t whether our government has acted in a way we don’t like, but what do we do to fight against it.”

One night during the training, I had dinner out on a patio with Karen Washington, an AIDS ministry lay leader at Friendship Baptist Church in Dallas. Washington, 37, tested positive at 23, but avoided taking HAART until three years ago because, she says, “I didn’t want to be a guinea pig.” She found out about her status while stationed on a U.S. Air Force base in London in 1987. “At the time I didn1t even know what the disease was,” she says, though she noticed that other blacks -- but not whites -- on her base were experiencing the same thing. “People in the government are always working on things that we’ll never know about. I thought that I might have gotten AIDS because something went wrong in the lab.” Williams says her mistrust of the government only grew in the ’90s after she heard reports of the mysterious symptoms of Gulf War Syndrome. She only went on HAART, years later, out of respect for her increasingly worried mother. For now, she’s doing well: Her CD4s are just shy of 500, and her viral load is undetectable.

As Washington and other PWAs at Tuskegee opened up to me about their postdiagnosis searchings, I found myself identifying with their fears, and with their basic suspicion about the disease and the drugs. As an African-American AIDS journalist, I have access to cutting-edge treatment information, and yet I haven’t been to a doctor in a year and a half. Maybe the truth is I’ve examined every crackpot theory from Tuskegee to Cleveland with an open mind because, quietly, I hope I can believe one of them. When you’re asymptomatic like I am, you really want to believe that AIDS can’t happen; if Valentine and Cost are right, and AIDS isn’t real, then I could distance myself from the virus in my blood.

Three months after the conference, I trek up to Columbia University at the edge of Harlem, to sit down with African-American scholars Mindy Fullilove, MD, a psychiatrist, and Robert Fullilove, EdD, a statistician and theologian, whom I met in Tuskegee. After 17 years of marriage and 14 years of partnered community research, the Fulliloves have their routine down pat. Today, she fields calls while he answers my questions. “As we’ve talked to people who are HIV infected, but are not interested in getting treatment, who have a completely different worldview about their illness and what they ought to do about it, it becomes very clear that saying ’Trust your doctor’ is not enough to make them accept advice,” Fullilove says. “They simply don’t accept science as the final word on anything to do with AIDS, and certainly not as the final word on what they should do about their health.”

In published essays and in many of the the 70 studies they’ve co-authored, the Fulliloves have examined myths about the origins of HIV, government intent with regard to AIDS, why African Americans are at greater risk, and why they avoid mainstream treatment. “Time isn’t enough to heal every wound,” he says, “or to resolve a worldview that made slavery possible. So there’s a tendency on the part of African Americans, founded in their experience, to view everything done by whites with suspicion and mistrust.” And to give the benefit of the doubt to solutions that come from within the black community.

Take Bronx resident Andre Cromer, 34. “All the stories I was hearing,” he says, his solid gold medallion swaying with every gesture, “was that the medicine kills you, not the disease, and that AZT is poison. I was looking for an alternative.” In 1992, six years before he was diagnosed with HIV, he found one. He was sitting in a large crowd at Louis Farrakhan’s majestic Mosque Maryam in Chicago when the NOI’s health minister, Abdul Alim Muhammad, took the stage. Cromer listened spellbound as Muhammad infused the audience with hope and racial pride, announcing that an AIDS cure, Kemron (a low-dose, oral preparation of alpha interferon), had been discovered in Africa. The miraculous news had been slow to spread, Muhammad said, because the discoverer, a Kenyan, couldn’t get black ink in the white press. At the Million Man March in 1995, Farrakhan shared his limelight with Muhammad to bring the same message to the masses; bow-tied Final Call salesmen were pushing the word about Kemron, too, penetrating black communities from Bed-Stuy to Compton.

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