Читать книгу Healing the Racial Divide - Lincoln Rice - Страница 8

This chapter will examine the life of Dr. Arthur G. Falls, highlighting segments that exhibit his work for racial justice. It will provide a historical context for his writings, which I will focus on in the following chapter. I begin with an overview of his background and childhood, followed by an introduction to his medical career and the start of his own family. This will set the stage for his work with the Chicago Urban League, the Federated Colored Catholics, and the Catholic Worker movement, as well as his correspondence with Cardinal Samuel Stritch, his integration into the upper-class white suburb of Western Springs, and his later work for hospital integration.

Remembering and listening to historical black Catholic figures is important. As Bryan Massingale asserts, “Thinking about the Catholic tradition’s pluralism, ambiguity, and contradictions through serious, responsible, careful, and disciplined scholarship—while also being attentive to the dynamics of exclusion, silence, and repression of certain voices in that tradition—strikes me as an essential dimension of the vocation of Catholic theologians today, and especially so for U.S. Catholic scholars of African descent.”126

Although I am not of African descent, I view my attentiveness to Falls as an affirmative response to Massingale regarding his vision of the Catholic ethicist.

Growing Up and the Riot of 1919

Falls was born in Chicago on Christmas Day 1901, in his family’s home at 3801 S. Dearborn Street. He was the descendant of Creole Catholics from Louisiana and the surrounding area.127 His father, William Arthur Falls, was a postal worker, and his mother, Santalia Angelica (née de Grand Pré), was a dressmaker.128 His father had converted to Catholicism as an adult, but his mother’s side of the family had been Catholic for generations, going back to their French ancestry.129

Falls could never remember a time that being African American did not signify “a certain handicap.” As a child, his parents would often remind him and his siblings that they had only one person to fear—God. His parents also taught the children that all people shared in a common humanity, reinforcing this with the warning “that if we ever attacked another child because he happened to be white, we would get a licking when we got home.”130

Falls’s parents sent him to a public school because the only Catholic school he could be admitted to was St. Elizabeth’s, which was designated for blacks and known to be inferior to the other Catholic schools. In addition, Falls noted that the North Central Association did not accredit St. Elizabeth High School and its students therefore could not attend Crane Junior College.131 Essentially, receiving a Catholic education would have meant that Falls could not have become a medical doctor.

Early on, Falls’s parents stressed the importance of religious tolerance, and he credited his family’s befriending of the Jewish family next door as the main reason he did not have anti-Semitic feelings growing up. It should be noted that the neighborhoods in which he grew up were mostly white.132 During Falls’s high school years, his father served many volunteer hours as the secretary for St. Monica’s Order of Foresters. Without being specific, Falls recalled an instance in which “I saw my father stand and fight on principle. He was the only person fighting in a group of two hundred, and I saw him fight until he won. This left a lasting impression on me.”133 The influence of this event will be seen throughout the life of Falls.

After graduating from Englewood High School in 1918, he attended Crane Junior College. There he befriended a group of German Jews who told him that he should not associate with Slavic Jews, as they were inferior. Believing this to be “silly,” he refused to follow their advice.134 Later on, while he was involved with the Catholic Worker movement, he had opportunities to speak to white Catholic schoolchildren, among whom he found a great deal of anti-Semitism. It was his practice in these situations to ask how many of the girls were named Mary. Many of the children would proudly raise their hands and tell him that the name was holy because it was the name of “our Holy Mother.” To this, he would respond: “Mary was a Jew. Christ was a Jew. And an Oriental Jew. Believe me, Oriental Jews are not blue-eyed blondes!” This line of reasoning usually made the kids think twice about their anti-Semitic comments.135

The summer of 1919 is often referred to as the Red Summer because there were over two dozen separate race riots in the United States, including one in Chicago.136 While the black population had been steadily increasing in Chicago since the Civil War, it doubled in the three years before the riot. This led to very tense racial conditions in the job market following the end of World War I, with the return of white workers whose labor had been replaced by black men. Many of the whites felt that black workers should be fired to provide more jobs for whites.137

The riot in Chicago lasted from 27 July to 3 August. On the second day of the riot, several white gangs stopped streetcars to pull off blacks, beat them, and in some cases, kill them. One gang attacked the streetcar one of Falls’s brother was riding on his way home from work. A white man on the streetcar hid Falls’s brother under his seat, saving him from being discovered.

On the third day of the riot, not realizing the situation was still dangerous, the eighteen-year-old Falls and his father decided to go to their jobs at the post office. They were attacked by a gang of whites on a street that was brimming with many other people going to work. After initially fighting back, Falls ran off, hoping to take most of the gang with him, which he did. Being young, fast, and athletic, he outran them and made it to the post office. His father arrived an hour later, with six white men who had surrounded him and protected him from the remaining members of the gang. They later discovered that a black man by the name of Robert Williams had been killed less than an hour earlier on the very corner where they had been attacked.138

Falls and his father did not bother trying to go to work the rest of the week. For the next few nights, they stayed alert in their home and listened to the rioting that, fortunately, did not come to their doorstep. The family did not own a gun. When they finally went back to work, the African Americans from his neighborhood traveled in groups of five or more, and Falls and his father armed themselves with knives.139

Falls had felt helpless as the rioting occurred outside his parents’ home, since they had little with which to protect themselves. Although Falls was never a proponent of violence in the struggle for racial justice, he never wavered in his belief in the right to self-defense.

Medical Career

Falls attended the prestigious Northwestern University Medical School and earned his bachelor of arts and doctor of medicine degrees in 1925.140 Though it was not required of most medical students at the time, Falls did an internship at Kansas City General Hospital the year before he graduated.141 This was his first experience of a city that was deeply segregated in all respects. Despite episodes of racial prejudice and violence in Chicago, he was accustomed to walking into any shop he pleased. In Kansas City, he was not allowed into most stores or restaurants because of his skin color. Even at church, he encountered racism: often, a white person would genuflect before entering Falls’s pew, but then notice that he was black and go to a different pew. He frequently “wondered why such people bothered to come to church at all.” These experiences in Kansas City gave him “a sense of being contaminated by the bigotry and discrimination,” and he temporarily developed a hate for white people that scared him. He was very glad to return to Chicago.142

Immediately after graduation, Falls opened his own office.143 At the time, newly minted physicians were expected to begin general practices of their own and to accumulate some experience before hospitals would even consider hiring them. In March 1926, Falls applied with a number of other blacks to the Chicago Medical Society. Out of that group, he was the only one to regularly write, call, and stop in the society’s office to see what was happening with his application, to which he was always told he would receive a response soon. He was finally notified of his admittance to the society in March 1927. None of the other African American doctors were admitted. Falls believed that the other men were not admitted because “they were not willing to fight.”144

From 1926 to 1930, Falls also worked as a junior surgeon from time to time at Wilson Hospital in Chicago. From 1932 onward, he worked more and more regularly at Provident Hospital in Chicago, initially as a junior surgeon, then as an attending surgeon, and for a time as the chief of staff.145 In his memoir, Falls pointed out that Provident was known as “the colored hospital” in Chicago, and a fellow physician noted its standing as a “second-rate” hospital, but it was one of the very few places that would hire Falls.146

During his time as a doctor, Falls wrote a number of articles in medical journals regarding the use of different treatments for various ailments.147 In 1929, he wrote an article for doctors just beginning in the medical profession entitled “As a Beginner Figures It Out,” 148 in which he lamented the constant difficulty in collecting bills. He began by using moral suasion—explaining to clients that he expected prompt payment in return for his full attention to their needs. This method was not successful, and he found that almost 25 percent of his patients were delinquent in their bills. In response, he sent a letter to all his delinquent patients, in which he clearly stated that all payments would be expected at the time of service, with emergency patients given an extra two weeks to pay. If he was to perform a surgery, 30 percent was due at the consultation, with the balance due at the time of the operation.

Dr. Falls at his office desk. Chicago Illinois: 1941. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, LC-USF34–038835-D.

When Falls wrote the article, he was also prosecuting two delinquent cases in court. The following year, his delinquent accounts only amounted to 6.92 percent of his clients. Falls concluded, “Every individual has certain hobbies; one of mine has been ‘figuring.’” He continued, “It seems to me that the sooner a practitioner establishes a reputation for demanding the same conscientious co-operation from his patients that they demand from him the sooner his collections will increase.”149 Falls applied the knowledge that “personal appeals alone” do not work to his future confrontations with racism.150

Marriage and Family

Arthur met his wife, Lillian Steele Proctor,151 on 18 April 1921, while he was a nineteen-year-old medical student at Northwestern. She was from Atlanta and had graduated summa cum laude from Fisk University. She was studying for her master’s degree in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, with a fellowship from the Urban League.152

Lillian was instrumental in changing Arthur’s attitude toward the role of women in marriage and society. He had initially thought that a woman should stay at home and raise the kids, but Lillian would not tolerate such a viewpoint since she planned on having a career in social work.153 The year before they married, Arthur purposefully read books on sociology and psychology “to understand more thoroughly the work that Lillian was doing and to establish a closer rapport with her.”154 Before, he had almost exclusively read medical texts, and his interest in her studies undoubtedly gave him a foundation in the social sciences.155

They dated for seven and a half years, with prolonged periods of separation usually pertaining to her schooling, before they married on 6 December 1928 in New York City in the living room of her parents’ house. The Congregationalist minister who witnessed their marriage was Dr. William D. Berry, an old Proctor family friend.156 In August 1929, Lillian received her master’s degree from the University of Chicago. Her thesis, “A Case Study of Thirty Superior Colored Children in Washington, DC,” studied the potential of black children in particular social and cultural settings.157

The Fallses had one son, Arthur Falls Jr., who was born on 19 October 1929 and baptized in the Catholic Church on 1 December. Later that December, they had a Catholic wedding in the rectory of a Catholic Church.158 It was an all too common practice during that time period for Catholics marrying non-Catholics to have the wedding in the rectory. It was not considered proper to celebrate a “mixed” wedding in the church building itself.

On 29 March 1929, Arthur’s father died unexpectedly. As members of Our Lady of Solace Catholic Church, his family wanted to have the funeral there. Since the riot of 1919 ten years earlier, however, there had been increased discrimination and segregation in Chicago, and St. Elizabeth’s had been deemed the church where funeral services were held for blacks. It was also the parish that many white Catholics believed was the only proper parish for black Catholics to attend. Therefore, Fr. Joseph Eckert, S.V.D., who was serving at St. Elizabeth’s, had announced to the congregation that the funeral would be at St. Elizabeth’s. The family had protested that William Falls would be “buried from his local parish or he would not be buried from a Catholic church at all.” The parish relented and on 1 April, Fr. MacDowell celebrated the funeral mass for William at Our Lady of Solace.159

Arthur Falls never understood why African Americans often segregated themselves. He had been raised not to segregate himself from whites, and he was well aware that better resources existed for whites. As such, the Fallses would go to the “white beaches” in Chicago because they knew that those beaches were superior. Realizing that this could become a dangerous situation if some whites decided they did not like the family being there, they always went to the beach with a loaded revolver. Fortunately, they never felt compelled to use it.160

Chicago Urban League

By early 1928, Falls had joined Albon L. Foster (d. 1968), executive secretary of the Chicago Urban League, in forming a local men’s division, which called itself the De Saible Club.161 The Chicago Urban League is an interracial organization that was founded in 1916 as the black population was rapidly increasing in Chicago. Representing a wide range of people and groups in the field of race relations, it promoted the social and economic advancement of blacks in the Chicago area. Arthur’s mother had always had an interest in community organizations like the League, and it was she who piqued Arthur’s interest in it.162 Another reason he became involved with the Chicago Urban League was because it “gave me a better opportunity of knowing social work in which Lillian was interested.”163 Most of all, though, he felt obligated to work with the group because “it gave me added opportunity to follow the promise that I had made as a child that as I lived I would fight discrimination and segregation.”164 When Arthur became involved with the Chicago Urban League, he was not aware of any Catholic group, such as the Federated Colored Catholics, that was interested in race issues.165

The De Saible Club hosted a number of speakers who provided an in-depth education for Falls concerning the plight of blacks in America and abroad, with the first speaker being W. E. B. Du Bois.166 From these speakers, who were often significant people in the field of race relations, Falls was “learning something of their attitudes and activities, all of which helped to provide a framework for the activity with which I would be engaged in the future.”167 The group also served the purpose of actively addressing issues in “industry, housing, health, discrimination and civic improvement.”168

In April 1928, this newly organized group was the first to make contact with the Chicago World’s Fair leadership about paying respect to Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable.169 Du Sable was the first settler in Chicago as well as a black Catholic. As Falls succinctly stated in 1968, “The first white man to settle in Chicago was black.”170 Other groups soon added their voices to those of the De Saible Club, and a replica of du Sable’s cabin would be exhibited at the fair when it opened in 1933.171

In February 1932, Falls was elected to the executive board of the Chicago Urban League and asked to organize its Interracial Commission. The commission was to examine race relations in the Chicago area and to be a coordinating point for the various groups working on racial justice.172 On 29 April, the commission met with Mayor Anton Cermak (1873–1933) to urge the appointment of African Americans to the school board, to ensure that there was a black voice to address problems related to racism. Cermak told them that the decisions had been already made for the term in question, but that he would strongly consider their suggestion next time.173 In February 1933, the mayor did not follow through with appointing an African American to the school board, although he did appoint Earl Dickerson, a black lawyer, as Assistant Attorney General of Illinois.174 Falls and the commission resumed pressuring the mayor about the school board, but Cermak was shot on 15 February while shaking hands with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and died on 6 March.175

On 3 April 1933, the commission met with the new mayor, Edward J. Kelly, but in May, Kelly appointed five white men who had no experience in education, with the obvious intention of pleasing his financial backers.176 In January 1938, Falls and the Interracial Commission were still asking the mayor to appoint an African American to the school board.177 It would not happen until late October 1939, when Dr. Midian O. Bousfield, a black physician, was appointed to the Chicago School Board by Mayor Kelly, although the exact reasoning and timing for the appointment are unclear.178

As the head of the Interracial Commission, Falls helped with the formation of an interracial group for the residents of Morgan Park and Beverly Hills. These were two adjacent areas of Chicago, with Morgan Park being almost completely black and Beverly Hills being completely white except for servants who lived there. Certain white residents in Beverly Hills were “disturbed” by the obvious segregation and asked the Interracial Commission to help them make some positive steps toward breaking down racial prejudice. In May 1932, Falls met with some of the residents to begin planning how best to organize such an association. Falls recommended waiting until October for a formal gathering, with smaller groups meeting in their respective communities in the interim. These groups were given a reading list that placed heavy emphasis on understanding the black experience through the social sciences.179

In October, at Bethany Union Church, Falls explained that the entire group would meet for the next six weeks to hear speakers on various race issues, with plenty of time for discussion. As chair of the Interracial Commission, he was in contact with various organizations, which he utilized in obtaining a number of expert speakers. Based on responses from the audience, he noted that between the first and last sessions, the attitude of many white people about blacks had undergone “some modification,” while blacks “still had [a] very deep-seated distrust” of whites.180

The following August, when Falls’s brother Leo moved into his Morgan Park home, the house was stoned. Falls used this as an opportunity to call a special meeting of the Morgan Park–Beverly Hills Interracial Group, to hold “very frank discussions which resulted in the organization taking a determined stand in terms of equal opportunities for all people.”181

As chair of the Interracial Commission, Falls performed a similar function in helping to form the Lower North Interracial Group on the Lower North Side of Chicago, where there was “increasing friction between Italian and Colored boys.”182 This situation was different from that between Beverly Hills and Morgan Park because the Italian and African American residents were not segregated. Beginning in December 1932, Falls arranged with the residents to have a number of speakers come and talk to them on race relations. In addition, a survey indicated that larger recreational facilities were needed so that the Italian and black children would not feel compelled to fight over the current resources, which were very limited.183

Within the context of forming and sustaining each of these interracial groups, Falls strongly emphasized teaching and listening. His two-pronged approach of assessing each group’s needs while communicating the latest scientific information on race undoubtedly had its source in Lillian with her expert knowledge of the social sciences.

Taking advantage of the Chicago World’s Fair, the Interracial Commission held a national conference on 20 June 1933 in the Illinois Host Building of the fairgrounds. Falls viewed this conference, which brought together experts in the field of race relations from all over the country, as “an outstanding success.”184 Noted personalities at the conference included Eugene Kinckle Jones (1885–1954) from New York, who was the first executive secretary of the National Urban League, and Mary McLeod Bethune (1875–1955) of Florida, a prominent educator and businesswoman who founded the National Council of Negro Women in 1932.185

On 15 July 1934, Falls decided to observe how the police would react to an organized interracial group of swimmers at Jackson Park Beach. A week before, the police had arrested eighteen swimmers at the beach who were promoting integration. This time, the police marched toward the interracial group in double columns and arrested eleven of the white swimmers. Falls believed that the intention of the police was to enforce segregation and scare interracial groups from attempting another event at the beach. The Interracial Commission met with the superintendent of the South Park System and a representative of the South Park police. After a two-hour discussion, the police agreed to change their tactics of enforcing segregation. They did in fact stop harassing interracial swimming groups, and there were no more disturbances at Chicago beaches that year.186

By May 1935, the commission had developed affiliations with about one hundred organizations and thousands of individuals.187 Nonetheless, it appears that after 1936, Falls involvement with the Urban League lessened, though he would carry the spirit of active struggle that was present in the league to his activities in the Catholic Worker movement.188 Unfortunately, Falls was not often forthcoming about his declining participation with any group. A plausible explanation in this case is that he thought the Catholic Worker would be a better avenue for racial integration and racial justice. Even though his involvement with the Chicago Urban League would be minimal by the late 1930s, he did rejoin its board of directors for a short period during the second half of the1940s.189

Federated Colored Catholics