“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
