Rev. Lang served as executive director of the Rafiki Coalition for Health and Wellness, formerly known as the Black Coalition on AIDS, from 2003 until his retirement in 2017. He led the organization’s mission to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS and eliminate health disparities in San Francisco’s Black and marginalized communities. Under his leadership, Rafiki Coalition provided health and wellness services including transitional housing for people living with HIV/AIDS, health education, advocacy, health case management, trauma resiliency and mental health circles, as well as other health-promoting activities. Rev. Lang received recognition from the NAACP and San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee for his work with the Black Coalition on AIDS. San Francisco State University also recognized Rev. Lang and the coalition with its 2006 Community Service Awards.

Prior to his work at Black Coalition on AIDS, Rev. Lang was a seasoned journalist of 20 years who was also vice president of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education in Oakland and co-founder of the Bay Area Black Journalists Association. He wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle for more than a decade and he underscored the realities of the Black community and the coverage of that in mainstream media. “I wanted to give a voice to the underrepresented. I saw that there was a civil rights struggle, and people like my uncle, a serviceman, were never quoted. They needed to be included, and someone needed to tell their story,” Rev. Lang said in a 2013 Bay Area Reporter article. “We need to have a media that’s reflective of the community they cover.”

Rev. Perry, as he is affectionately known, is the former Associate Minister of the historic Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco and former Director of the Fifth Sunday Interfaith Circle, a quarterly multi-faith fellowship. He is also Executive Director of Triumph of the Human Spirit, a musical production and CD enterprise that examines the resilience of the human spirit through the legacy of the American slave trade.

Rev. Lang is the oldest of three children, born to grandparents and parents who escaped the limitations of sharecropping in the south (Alabama and Georgia) and moved north (New York) during the Great Black Migration in America. He is the heir of factory workers and entrepreneurs, who bought and leveraged homes so their children’s lives could be better; he embraces a family voting legacy that includes both Democrats and Republicans.