A lonely prophet falls in Chicago

National Catholic Reporter, March 3, 2000 by Tim Unsworth

When Dorothy Day was "on pilgrimage," as she liked to describe it, she visited the Catholic Worker house in Chicago, a city in which she had spent much of her youth. The details are sketchy, but sometime during one of these visits she injured her arm and was taken to a local Catholic hospital. The sisters who worked there were in a flutter over this icon who represented their most deeply felt values.

Day was asked if she had a private physician in the area that she wished to consult. She replied that she had. So, Dr. Arthur G: Falls was called to the hospital's emergency room.

Falls came because Dorothy Day represented the Catholic faith as he envisioned it, but he was concerned.

When he arrived, the anxiety shifted to the sisters. Falls was black. No matter that he was a cradle Catholic who was instrumental in bringing the Catholic Worker movement to Chicago. This Catholic hospital, in common with all others in the vast archdiocese, did not allow African-American physicians.

"Colored doctors treated colored patients in colored hospitals," Falls recalled in a 1991 interview I did with him for a book I was working on. "They were there, and we were here. Segregation was so simple that even a bigot could understand it."

There was some nervous discussion. Eventually, Falls was allowed to treat Day, although a white physician had to admit her to the hospital.

After she left, Falls waited a decent interval and applied for staff status. It would mean that he could refer and treat patients at a Catholic hospital that had a crucifix in every room. He was turned down and so were his black patients. "I could get a white patient in," he said. "But I had to get a white colleague to admit the patient and do the treatment."

"The time is not opportune," the official church used to say when confronted by these moral outrages. "The time was never opportune," Dr. Falls recalled. "But let me tell you this: Segregation is always a conscious thing. It's not just a way of life or a cultural thing. Those who were responsible always knew what they were doing. And that included church leaders."

In mid-January, Dr. Arthur Falls was buried from St. John of the Cross Catholic Church in Western Springs, a Chicago suburb, where Falls had built a home years ago in a painful effort to integrate the suburb. He was 98 years old and had been living in a nursing home in Lawton, Mich. Only a handful of people were at the funeral. Many who remembered him thought he was already dead.

Arthur Falls suffered because he was a Catholic well ahead of his time. He was a forerunner of an ecclesiastical civil rights movement that would not flower until the '60s. In Chicago, a corps of clergy and laity were pressing for reform since the late 1930s. But nothing really happened until the mid-1960s.

In his younger days Falls was affiliated with the Federated Colored Catholics, a group formed from the ribs of the earlier Committee for the Advancement of Colored Catholics. "It should have been just `Catholics'," he said to me over 50 years later, stressing his often repeated theme of catholic as a synonym for universal.

"This isn't very Christian," he continued, "but at one of our meetings, we discussed whether or not there was such a thing as a decent white man." The question indicates the anger felt by "colored" Catholics who had been pressing their faces against the stained glass of church windows for decades.

The federation eventually evolved into the Catholic Interracial Council of New York, which spread to many other cities, including Chicago, where Falls tried to initiate a chapter. But he never quite succeeded in turning racial justice into a popular movement among Catholics.

Falls was the son of a post office employee and a dressmaker. His parents were Creole Catholics, people descended from or culturally related to the French settlers of the Southern United States, especially Louisiana, which has the largest number of black Catholics in the country.

Born in 1901, he attended public elementary and high school (no Catholic school would accept him). After junior college, he entered Northwestern University's Medical School, where the professors in the gross anatomy lab would assure the students they needn't be nervous about making mistakes. "Don't worry about it," they were told. "We can always go out on the street and get a nigger to dissect."

Falls' parish as a child was Our Lady of Solace. "There was very little solace," he recalled. "Officially, we didn't have to sit in a separate part of the church as in some parishes. But we had to go to the children's Mass, although we couldn't sit with the parish school children. On Saturdays, when we went to confession, whites had their confessions heard first. We had to keep going to the back of the line. Each parish had its way of telling you that you didn't belong."

Falls got his medical license in 1925. He established an office on Chicago's South Side, near Provident Hospital, the only hospital that would accept black physicians. It was years before even one Catholic hospital would accept black patients.