“The Color and Character of AA” Reply to Bill White.

Editor's note: Today Glenn C. responds to Bill White's discussion of his book about the varieties of AA experience across the color line. Next up: his thoughts on the recovery plays of Jackie B.

 

William L. White is the author ofSlaying the Dragon: The History of Addiction Treatment and Recovery in America (orig. pub. 1998, 2nd ed. 2014), the classic history of treatment and recovery programs, covering the entire course of modern American history since its beginning.  I first met him at the 6th National A.A. Archives Workshop in 2001, where I was on the planning committee, and he was the keynote speaker. After hearing him in person, I was so glad we had chosen him as our main speaker — it was the most fascinating and eye-opening talk on the general history of recovery in America I had ever heard. And Bill himself is a wonderful person. Close to Ernie Kurtz, he played a valuable role as one of the stabilizing figures in the AA History Lovers during the last two or three years of Nancy Olson’s life. And it was Bill who presided over Ernie’s memorial service in April of 2015 at Dawn Farm in Ypsilanti.

His book, Slaying the Dragon, made it clear that a really good and thorough history of A.A. would have to supply material about the context in which the new A.A. movement had developed. Nothing historical comes into existence out of a complete vacuum, and in A.A.’s case, there was a long history in the United States of trying various methods for dealing with both alcoholism and drug addiction. Some of these had a strong influence on early AA principles and methods — and also on struggles and controversies in which AA became involved later on, as we can see from Nancy Olson’s book With a Lot of Help from Our Friends.

Parts of Bill White’s book and parts of Nancy Olson’s book could be read quite profitably in conjunction with one another. As Bill White says, we need to look at the history of early black A.A. in the context of the broader social and political movements in which it occurred.

WASHINGTON, D.C. Of the three earliest black A.A. groups, the social and political background of the Washington, D.C. group was the clearest. It was founded by Dr. James C. Scott, Jr., who had earned both an undergraduate degree and an M.D. from Howard University, one of the two top historically black universities. Dr. Scott, in other words, was an educated black man of the professional class who was trained at one of the major twentieth century centers for the black revolution which arose in the United States during the twentieth century. Read more of this post