My husband [Bill Hoover] used to tell me, used to tell me that he had a slip. I said, not really. 'Cause after Ray Moore called on him that evening, he drank the next day, and never had a drink since. So you really -- I couldn't even call that a slip, could you? He called on him that day, he didn't know enough about the program -- bad handled -- so he drank that night, never no more!

Said he was just determined. We really went through a lot ....

I said, well you couldn't really call that a slip, because the man just come over and talked to you, you didn't know anything about the program.

But I came in thinking I knew quite a bit -- which I did, 'cause I had read the Big Book. I read any and everything! Like my Grapevines [the A.A. periodical]. I run through 'em, and then I put 'em right here, and I read 'em over.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Getting someone in the South Bend A.A. group to make a twelfth step call was only the first of many barriers that would have to be surmounted. Ray Moore -- who has been dead for many years now, Jimmy said -- continued to come through for her and Bill, and served as their sponsor during those earliest years, hearing their fifth steps, and advising and counseling and supporting them and fighting for them every step of the way.

But when Jimmy and Bill came into A.A., it was still 1948, and the terms on which help was offered them by the South Bend A.A. group at first was incredibly humiliating and demeaning, in often unbelievably petty ways. The closed meetings were still normally house meetings in those days, and when Jimmy and Bill went to one of the few white homes where they would be admitted at all, they were promptly sent back to the kitchen like household menials, and could hear only as much of the people speaking as would travel back to that distant part of the house.

JIMMY MILLER: So when Bill would walk it, they would invite us into the kitchen. The women took time to give us some broken cups! And they decided to give us broken cups, so we just took it. Ray told us, no matter what, be calm about it, so we sit in the kitchen, where we could hear from the family room, living room, whatever.

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Side Note:

BROWNIE  TOLD  THE

SAME  STORY

EDITOR'S NOTE: Even in 1950, two years later, when Brownie (Harold Brown) came into the South Bend A.A. program, he said that he, as a black man, was also at first given the broken-cup treatment when he went to A.A. meetings at white people’s homes. (This is taken from a tape recording of a lead he gave around 1972.)

BROWNIE: When I come on the A.A. program, my people wasn't welcome. They was meeting in the homes at that time. I had to drink coffee out of a broken cup because they refused to give me a decent cup! Yes, I've sat in some of'em's homes, where they put their finger in their nose at me, then they buck at me. In other words, want me to get out of there.

But I wasn't particular about being with them. What I wanted is what you had. I was trying to get sober. All I wanted to do was to learn it. They couldn't run me away. The rest of 'em were behind me pushing, saying "Brown, push on!" and they kept pushing me, and I kept going. It's to say, oh, look it! It wasn't easy for me to make the A.A. program.

But I come here [into this hostile situation], a thought come to me: if they open the door, I get it myself. And I begin to study this A.A. program. And when I mean study it, I know it. I don't need you to tell me about it. I knows everything, in the steps and everything, what it says.

And they told me that this was a spiritually program. Well now, if this is a spiritually program, ain't got no business being prejudiced. My God tells me, "I have no respect for persons." Alcohol ain't prejudiced. It don't give a damn who it tear down.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: So the tales of black people being given only the chipped and cracked coffee cups to drink from in early South Bend A.A. are amply documented, as embarrassing as this fact is to many present-day white A.A. members in this area.

But to get back to Jimmy Miller and her story: Although Jimmy and Bill Hoover were allowed to attend closed A.A. house meetings as long as they could tolerate this deeply offensive treatment, it was six or seven months before the white members would allow them to go to open meetings at all. Even then, it was not until two black A.A. members from Chicago came over to South Bend to give leads at the South Bend open meeting on several occasions, that the black people in the South Bend A.A. program began to be treated with at least a measure of ordinary social respect.

The two black A.A.'s from Chicago were Earl Redmond and Evans Avenue Bill W. (Bill Williams), so being able to record some of Bill's memories of those long ago events was a special privilege for the two members of the Area 22 Archives Committee.

JIMMY MILLER: So then, we still couldn’t go to an open meeting. So we just kept meeting, and then, one or two more blacks called, and we met that way, and then Ray got real worried, and Bill's wife [at that time] called her cousin in Chicago: Earl Redmond. So Ray had a hard time getting permission for him to speak at an open meeting ....

We still wasn't allowed to go to an open meeting, but we went anyway, so when he finished talking -- now this is a good six, seven months later -- they opened up, and said we could come to an open meeting.

We could come to the group, and Ray told us don't be talking, just listen, and learn, and that's the way. And after we got about five more blacks . . . . that’s the way the group got started.

But we were treated real coldly at the open meetings, and finally -- like several of the speakers, we tried to shake their hands, and they would just turn and walk off -- [but] after Earl Redmond come down about three times, then they started shaking hands.

Hey Raymond, what's the other gentleman, Bill's other cousin in Chicago?

RAYMOND: [Evans Avenue] Bill Williams.

JIMMY MILLER: Bill Williams, he come down, and after he made a talk it really opened up for us.

RAYMOND: Fourth black man to make A.A. in Chicago.

JIMMY MILLER: And I'm telling you! But we held on.

RAYMOND: Do you remember being at the talk, that Earl Redmond made, to help you all get in?

JIMMY MILLER: Yes I do. He said, you know, this was basically formed: no race, creed, religion, or anything. And then if you read it out the Big Book, it's all [a matter of] if you had the desire to stop drinking, that's all that's required.

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RACE RELATIONS IN THE

NORTHERN UNITED STATES

During the 1930's and 40's and afterwards

Any black person in South Bend old enough to remember the world before Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. will tell you that the humiliating treatment given to Jimmy and Bill at first was simply typical of the period, and that such treatment was a daily part of every black person’s life. Many white people in the United States to this day believe that racial discrimination against black people only happens in the southern states, but every black person I have ever talked to who has lived in both parts of the country, has told me that racial discrimination is equally bad in both north and south. All of my own observation of life in the north (Chicago, the upper Midwest, Massachusetts, New York City, and so on) shows that they are totally correct. Black people who began leaving the south to live in northern cities around the mid twentieth century moved because that is where the jobs were, in the factories and foundries, not because there was less prejudice there, or any less likelihood of being beaten or killed by white people.

King's Problems in Chicago

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. did not begin his work until several years after the first black men and women came into A.A. in Chicago and South Bend (which was around 1945-48). Dr. King's first major protest was the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955. This took place in the south, in Alabama, as did the major integration campaign he carried out later on in Birmingham, in 1963. It was only after this that Dr. King went north to work in Chicago, where his marchers were met by white mobs led by uniformed Neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klansmen, in an even more violent and vicious opposition than he had encountered in the south. When King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, it could be argued that Chicago still stood as a partial failure for him: that city had proven to be far more resistant than the cities of the American south to truly basic change in racial attitudes at the public and political level.

A.A. in Chicago and South Bend

So the world inside A.A. circles in Chicago and South Bend was in fact twenty years ahead of the world outside of them on racial issues: getting black people into some of the closed meetings (on any terms) was a miracle for the 1940's, and getting them into the open meetings was a further miracle, and putting an end to at least some of the discriminatory treatment was yet another miracle. Young people today often do not realize (until they look back at how bad things were in the 1930's and early 40's) how much was actually accomplished in eliminating the worst kinds of racism in A.A. in the years which followed, and how difficult it was to bring this about. It was done by attacking the issues at the fundamental spiritual level, and by insisting that the spiritual principles of the program had to take precedence over personalities, and personal likes and dislikes, and politics, and blind cultural taboos. It also took a handful of people, both black and white, who had an astonishing courage, and a willingness to speak lovingly, but boldly and honestly, when basic spiritual principles were at stake.

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BACK TO JIMMY MILLER'S STORY

EDITOR: But to return to Jimmy's story. At one point, Raymond asked her what she remembered of some of the details of that open meeting where Earl Redmond, the first black speaker the South Bend A.A. group had ever had, came over from Chicago.

RAYMOND: Well 'd Ken Merrill play the piano or something -- didn't he play the piano for you all?

JIMMY MILLER: Yeah.

RAYMOND: And ... I mean when Earl Redmond and them came in?

JIMMY MILLER: Yes. But Ken ....

RAYMOND: And I think Earl Redmond made a statement like Bill [Hoover] used to tell me, said when Earl came down he made such a powerful talk. He said the same whiskey that'll make a white man drunk, will make a black man drunk.

JIMMY MILLER: That's right, he explained all of that. It was a talk you just -- it kept everybody spellbound. And it opened the doors for us.