Will you take just a few minutes, right now, and click on the following link to help smack down AIDS in Michigan and around the world?
Almost exactly nineteen years ago today, my friend Greg Witcher died of AIDS. He was all of 32 years old, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal in Detroit, in the prime of life. I was staying with Greg the night he died, because Roy Roulhac, who was somehow taking care of Greg while keeping up his professional life, was on a work trip. Greg died on my watch.
Last month, I agreed to join the board of the Michigan AIDS Coalition, because I realized I’m not done fighting for Greg.
My first concrete act will be to join thousands of others on Sunday, September 20 in Royal Oak for AIDS Walk Detroit. If you’d like to join me in the walk, please e-mail me at asl@andylevin.org. Most of you can’t do that. But you can make a donation, whatever you can afford, whether $5 or $50 or $500 or $5,000, to support me and more importantly people living with AIDS and people whom we can prevent from becoming infected with HIV.
Please hit this link now to donate:
You may also visit the event’s homepage at:
Greg grew up in Anacostia, the poorest part of Washington DC. Through brains and charm and the help of a few good people, he got a full scholarship to a fancy boarding school and then to Williams College, where I met him. He was the president of the Black Student Union when someone burned a cross on campus. I remember running to his room and waking him up to tell him. He was hardly a radical, and a reluctant protest leader. But he did what justice demanded of him. The picture of Greg speaking to the mass rally many of us organized that day is part of Williams history.
After college, Greg became a reporter for the Boston Globe and then the Wall Street Journal. We overlapped in Boston when I was an organizer there and in Detroit when I was in graduate school in Ann Arbor and in DC around holidays, because Greg never forgot where he came from and he got back to see his mom in Anacostia frequently. Sadly, she outlived her youngest son.
HIV slowly sucked the lifeforce out of Greg. He wasted away before my eyes, until he was only skin and bones and pain — shot through with his mordant sense of humor, right till the end.
We’ve made embarrassingly little progress in the battle against HIV and AIDS since then. Will you take a small step to help do more? Please click on this link and donate what you can.
Please share this message with others as you see fit.
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