One Drunk to Another The Only Requirement
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Illustration · A felt letter board in a hallway, listing a week of AA meetings, each by a group named in this piece. Imagined: those groups met in different cities and different years, never on one board.

The Only Requirement

Groups of their own

How alcoholics unlike AA’s founders found the door partly shut, and often started groups of their own.

“The only requirement for A.A. membership is a desire to stop drinking.”

AA’s Third Tradition, in its short form · Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, 1953

AA’s Third Tradition says the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. Its first groups were mostly white men in middle age, and the alcoholics who weren’t often found the door only partly open.

This piece follows them part by part: Black alcoholics in Washington, D.C., who rented a room at the YMCA in 1945; young members told to go out and drink some more; the members who carried AA overseas; Spanish speakers who translated the Big Book themselves; Black members let in on terms, or not at all, from South Bend to Little Rock; gay and lesbian members who asked to be listed like any other group; and Native communities, a reservation at a time. Legacy ends with today, when a group of its own is one more line in a meeting list, and with AA’s own count of who comes.

It’s built from AA’s own books and pamphlets, the Grapevine and AA’s newsletter Box 4-5-9, the history Bob P. wrote for AA’s office in 1985, Glenn C.’s Heroes of Early Black AA, members’ stories in the Big Book, and the groups’ own histories. Where the sources disagree, and about who came first they often do, these pages say so.

Start with 1 · Two dollars a night

Groups of their own, year by year

  1. 1942Late in the year AA’s first letters from Australia reach New York, from a psychiatrist and a priest in Sydney.
  2. 1944In October AA’s office writes that it has no Black group anywhere.
  3. 1945AA’s first Black groups meet in St. Louis, Chicago and Washington, D.C.
  4. 1946Young people’s groups start in Philadelphia and San Diego, and Ireland has its first meeting in November.
  5. 1946Ricardo P. of Cleveland takes his wife’s Spanish translation of the Big Book to Bill W.
  6. 1948In South Bend two Black alcoholics are told AA has no “set-up for colored people.” A white member sponsors them anyway.
  7. 1953The first all-Indian group in the U.S. is believed to have started in Oneida, Wisconsin.
  8. 1958Young people in AA hold their first international conference, in Niagara Falls.
  9. 1962In Little Rock a white group lets Joe McQ. come to its meeting if he doesn’t drink the coffee.
  10. 1969Delegates from abroad meet in New York at the first World Service Meeting.
  11. 1972At Alkali Lake, in British Columbia, Phyllis C. and Andy C. quit drinking and start holding meetings in their house.
  12. 1974AA’s General Service Conference agrees that all groups, gay groups among them, should be listed in its directories.
  13. 1996The first copies of La Viña, AA’s magazine in Spanish, come off the press in June.
  14. 2019AA’s new Big Book in American Sign Language comes out on four discs.
  15. 2022In AA’s membership survey, 87.7 percent of the members who answered say they are white.
  16. 2025AA replaces its 1989 pamphlet for Native members with Indigenous People in A.A.

Walk through who came in, 1942 to today

Each part has a short story, a one-minute audio stop, and a closer look for anyone who wants to go deeper. Read them in order, or start anywhere.

    New to the story? The Kitchen Table tells how AA began, from one drunk talking to another to millions around the world.

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