Jackson Free Press

Charles King is the president and a co-founder of Housing Works Inc., a non-profit organization that provides a full range of services for homeless men, women and children living with HIV/AIDS. Housing Works is the largest community-based AIDS services organization in the United States and currently serves more than 5,000 people each year. He holds a law degree and a master of divinity from Yale University. King has a combined background as a minister and lawyer to develop Housing Works as a self-sustaining, healing community based on aggressive advocacy, mutual aid and collective empowerment.

So what brings you to Mississippi?

I initially came to Mississippi on a barnstorming tour from around the country for the Campaign to End AIDS. Once I had spent some time in there, I came to appreciate how severe the situation is in Mississippi for people with HIV/AIDS and how unresponsive the state has been. Housing Works is now working with local AIDS Service Organizations to organize activism around HIV in Mississippi.

Why do you keep coming back here?

In the last eight months I have visited more than 60 cities in 30 states around the United States. Of all of the places that I have visited, Mississippi is undoubtedly the worst place to live in, in terms of people with HIV/AIDS—both in terms of lack of services and the heavy burden of stigma. I believe that if we can address the AIDS crisis in Mississippi, we can address it anywhere in the United States.

How did you get started in this field?

My first introduction to AIDS was as a minister of a Missionary Baptist Church in New Haven, Conn., when a sex worker, i.e. prostitute, who worked the stroll in the park across the street was exposed on the front page of the New Haven Register as someone who was putting white suburban men at risk for HIV. My horror at the way her life was destroyed first made me conscious of the impact of the AIDS epidemic on an individual's life. It took 2 1/2 years, two dozen funerals and the death of the church's minister of music for me to come out to the congregation as a gay man and thus, begin my work as an AIDS activist. After I left that congregation, I enrolled in law school and joined ACT-UP (a non-partisan group united in anger and committed to ending AIDS).

Why are you interested in the Medicaid crisis in Mississippi?

There has been a major movement over the last several years to control federal and state costs by cutting back on Medicaid funding services and on populations covered by Medicaid. The Medicaid restrictions on prescriptions drugs implemented by Mississippi this year are among the most draconian of all the cuts being made to poor people of any state in the nation. We need to stop balancing the state budgets on the backs of the poor, and we need to make our stand in places like Mississippi, otherwise other states are going to join in a race to the bottom on the quality of care to our citizens.

What is the Campaign to End AIDS?

The C2EA is an effort to build a new AIDS activist movement that is galvanized and visible in every state and territory in the U.S. in order to compel our political, civic and religious leaders to do what needs to be done to bring an end to AIDS as an epidemic in our own country and as a pandemic in our world. This is literally a caravan of activists traveling through every state across the country to end up in a huge rally in our nation's capital.

What is it like being a lawyer and an ordained minister?

They are both advocacy positions; you are just appealing to different judges.

Do the two positions ever conflict?

Not at all. Micah 6:8 tells us exactly what God wants of us: that we do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God. I believe at their best, the roles of a lawyer and of a minister are both to do justice and love mercy.

So what's the deal with your ponytail?

When I announced to my friends that I was going to go to law school, they were suspicious that I was going to end up at a corporate law firm. To put them at ease, I vowed in 1985 that I wouldn't cut my hair until I completed law school, and it hasn't been cut since.

The C2EA caravan will be in Jackson on Oct. 30 at the Capitol.