1. Blood Pride

On April 20, 1990, tens of thousands of demonstrators—50,000 by police estimations, 80,000 according to the rally organizers—crossed the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City from Cadman Plaza to Manhattan’s City Hall in what came to be known as the “Haitian AIDS March.” They were protesting against a Federal health policy on blood donations that stigmatized certain communities, with Haiti being at the very center of the polemic. In February of that year, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) prohibited all Haitians in the United States from donating blood under the suspicion of their being infected by HIV/AIDS. Dr. Jean Claude Compas, chairman of the Haitian Coalition on AIDS and one of the organizers of the march, remarked on the restriction: “This policy is on the basis that Haitian blood is dirty, that it is all infected with the HIV virus.”