When it comes to AIDS, it’s about time – in more ways than one. It’s been 25 years to be exact, and too many men and women are gone. Of the million or so Americans living with HIV/AIDS, 650,000 are black.

“We’ve got to lead the charge. We’ve got to own this issue,” Bruce Gordon, the head of the not-so-charge-leading NAACP, said the other day.

He was laying out the latest grandly announced mobilization, in the spirit of the Balm in Gilead – which jerked the clergy awake years ago – and the National Black Leadership Council on AIDS.

This latest rallying of black folks of influence may actually be the real deal. At a gathering last week, politicians like Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., clergy members like the Revs. Gregory Robeson Smith and Edwin Sanders, and civil rights leaders like Gordon actually signed on the dotted line, as it were, their pledge to a “Declaration of Commitment to End the AIDS Epidemic in Black America.”

Danny Glover, the actor who has a brother who’s lived with AIDS for 15 years, made a touching appeal to black folks to do something, especially because, as he said, teenagers are increasingly at risk. “The crisis,” he said, “is becoming younger and younger.”

And this crusade, this time, has another advantage: Major media organizations that reach millions of black folks every day, Black Entertainment Television, the National Newspaper Publishers Assn. and the American Urban Radio Network, have signed on.

I began writing about what became known as AIDS in the 1980s when the country was hysterical about the disease. I was horrified at the instinct at all levels of government to identify and ostracize those deemed carriers of what we know now as HIV: gay men, Haitians, intravenous drug users, etc. In court, spouses or former lovers tried to deny visitation rights to children of anyone with AIDS or who might develop AIDS. People feared eating from plates that someone with AIDS might have touched.

And over the years, the silence among black folks has been deafening – starting with the sanctimonious church people who know that so many gay men make up the choirs, the music directors and even the clergy. So it is particularly heartening now to hear ministers step up.

I haven’t been to any AIDS-related funerals lately, probably because many in my circle have the access to health care that too many people do not. But there was a time, oh my Lord … My brother John Shipp Jr., a minister, died of AIDS. My good friend Jean-Roland Coste, a prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, died of AIDS. My best friend, Victor Tyus, a talented writer, linguist and lawyer, died of AIDS.

This new Declaration of Commitment says in part: “If we are to have any chance of winning the battle for racial justice in America, black America must confront the AIDS epidemic.”

From our lips to God’s ears. It’s about time.