A. Cornelius Baker, Champion of H.I.V. Testing, Dies at 63

Working inside the government and out, he lobbied to improve the lives of people with H.I.V. and AIDS, particularly those who belonged to minority groups.

A. Cornelius Baker, who spent nearly 40 years working with urgency and compassion to improve the lives of people with H.I.V. and AIDS by promoting testing, securing federal funding for research and pushing for a vaccine, died on Nov. 8 at his home in Washington. He was 63.

Gregory Nevins, his companion, said the cause was hypertensive atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.

Mr. Baker — who was gay and who tested positive for H.I.V. — became active in Washington in the 1980s, during the early years of the AIDS epidemic. He soon distinguished himself as an eloquent voice for people with H.I.V. and AIDS. A policy wonk and health-care expert, he held positions in the federal government and with nonprofits, including serving as the head of a clinic for the L.G.B.T.Q. community.

“He was very kind, very embracing and inclusive — his circles, both professionally and personal, were the most diverse I’ve ever seen, which was driven by his Christian values,” said Douglas M. Brooks, a director of the Office of National AIDS Policy during the Obama administration. “His ferocity appeared when people were marginalized, othered or forgotten.”

In 1995, as the executive director of the National Association of People with AIDS, he helped establish June 27 as National H.I.V. Testing Day. “This effort was designed to help reduce the stigma of H.I.V. testing and to normalize it as a component of regular health screening,” Mr. Baker wrote in 2012 on the website of FHI 360, a global health organization for which he served as technical adviser.

As an adviser to the National Black Gay Men’s Advocacy Coalition from 2006 to 2014, Mr. Baker worked with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health to help fund research for the care of gay Black men with H.I.V. and AIDS.

He was particularly concerned that those like himself — and gay men who belonged to other minority groups — had been disproportionately affected by the epidemic.

“We’re tired of words; what we need is action,” he told The New York Times in 1994, during a conference of advocacy groups seeking more help from the Clinton administration. Clinical trials for drugs to treat AIDS, he said, often failed to include Black and Hispanic subjects.

“We’ve been in this fight for 15 years now, longer than World War II,” he added, “and the numbers will be greater than the Holocaust.”

Mr. Baker was an early volunteer in the N.I.H.’s AIDS vaccine trials and hoped that other gay Black men would follow his lead.

“This was in the shadow of Tuskegee,” said Sandra L. Thurman, the director of the Office of National AIDS Policy from 1997 to 2001, referring to the federal government’s infamous study of about 400 poor, uneducated Black men with syphilis in Alabama. From 1932 to 1972, they were exploited to study the ravages of that sexually communicable disease, although they hadn’t given informed consent and were never treated, even after penicillin was found to be a cure in the 1940s.

The distrust that grew out of the Tuskegee study impeded efforts to fight AIDS in some Black neighborhoods, AIDS educators said, and Mr. Baker lobbied for President Bill Clinton to apologize for the federal government’s involvement.

In 1997, Mr. Baker told The New York Times that many Black people would not take AIDS medicine, fearing that they would be “killed off as part of the master plan.”

Mr. Clinton eventually apologized, saying in part, “What the United States did was shameful, and I am sorry.”

Antonio Cornelius Baker was born on Sept. 30, 1961, in Sodus, a village in upstate New York. He grew up in Apopka, Fla., with his maternal grandmother, Fannie Baker, and later in Syracuse with his mother, Shirley Baker, a social worker who was the coordinator of family services for New York State Correctional Services (now the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision). His father was Adel Robinson.

For a brief time, Mr. Baker considered pursuing a career in the arts. He studied comparative literature at Eisenhower College (which was acquired and then closed by the Rochester Institute of Technology while he was there) in Seneca Falls, N.Y.; did an internship at the Kennedy Center; and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1983. That same year, he was hired as arts editor of the weekly Washington City Paper, where he stayed for two years.

Around that time, he started raising money for a local gay foundation, Brother, Help Thyself, and in 1985 he went to work for Carol Schwartz, a city councilwoman of the District of Columbia, as an executive assistant.

As Ms. Schwartz recalled, he demonstrated political skills that could not be taught. “He had the compassion, commitment, empathy and energy of no other,” she said in an interview.

Mr. Baker left in 1989 to work in the White House Presidential Personnel Office early in President George H.W. Bush’s administration. Later that year, he moved to the Department of Health and Human Services, as an assistant in its national AIDS program office.

While there, Louis W. Sullivan, the secretary of the department, sent Mr. Baker to meet with Ms. Thurman, then the executive director of AID Atlanta, which provides H.I.V. and AIDS services.

“He sent Cornelius to see what we could do together in Atlanta to address the epidemic,” she said, adding that Mr. Baker “was looking around the country to help different populations affected by H.I.V., including African Americans, not just in big cities like New York and San Francisco.” Their work led to H.H.S. funding for cities most impacted by AIDS and for Black and other minority communities.

In 1992, Mr. Baker left to join the National Association of People with AIDS as its policy director; four years later, he was named executive director. In late 1999, he was hired as the executive director of the Whitman-Walker Clinic, which provides health care to the L.G.B.T.Q. community in the Washington area.

While there, he dealt with the clinic’s funding challenges and one of the highest AIDS rates in the country, as well as his own health problems, including shingles and a plunge in his T-cell count.

Over the next two decades, Mr. Baker held advisory positions at the National Black Gay Men’s Advocacy Coalition; the State Department’s Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator and Health Diplomacy; and the Office of AIDS Research at the National Institutes of Health. Mr. Baker, who loved trips to Manhattan to see theater, also served as a trustee of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS for more than 30 years.

His honors include an Award of Courage from amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research, in 2000, and a 2021 James Baldwin Legacy Award from the National Black Justice Coalition.

In addition to his mother and Mr. Nevins, who is senior counsel at Lambda Legal, promoting L.G.B.T.Q. equality, Mr. Baker is survived by his sisters, Chandrika Baker, Nadine Wallace and Yavodka Bishop, and his brothers, Kareem and Roosevelt Dowdell.

Ms. Schwartz, the former councilwoman, said that her relationship with Mr. Baker developed into a deep friendship. After his death, she obtained permission from his mother to bury some of his remains in an urn at a Georgetown cemetery.

“He was so beloved here — it was his home for 42 years — I felt he should have a place here,” Ms. Schwartz said, adding: “He was extraordinary — he just had a brilliant mind and a great sense of humor. His smile will linger on.”