Physician · Medical Professor · Co-Founder of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity

Henry Arthur Callis was born in Rochester, New York, on January 14, 1887. Rochester in the late nineteenth century was a crossroads of northern Black migration, its Erie Canal corridor attracting both industrial workers and professionals. Callis’s lineage blended the freedom struggle and the Black ecclesiastical tradition. His father, Rev. Henry Jesse Callis, born enslaved in Virginia in 1858, became a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. His mother, Josephine Sprague Callis, born in Maryland in 1862, was reputedly related by marriage to Frederick Douglass—Douglass’s daughter Rosetta married a member of the Callis family. Henry’s grandparents on his father’s side had been enslaved and traced their origins to the Ashanti people of West Africa.

When Henry was only three, his mother died in an elevator accident. He was then taken in by his maternal grandfather, John Sprague, who reared him until age ten. The loss, though devastating, seemed to sharpen the boy’s academic drive. He entered Central High School of Rochester in 1901, already signed to the school’s lofty motto, “Education—to build in every neighborhood a common growth.” As a student he joined the debating and track teams and participated in a civic group called Congress, showing early leadership and oratorical skill.

Callis entered Cornell University in 1905. There, amid the isolation facing the handful of Black students at the predominantly white Ivy League institution, he and six peers created a study and social group that in 1906 became Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, the first intercollegiate Greek-letter fraternity founded by African American men. Callis was its intellectual architect—often described as the “philosopher of Alpha Phi Alpha.” He drafted early constitutions, shaped its ritual, and argued for expansion beyond Cornell so that Black collegians elsewhere could find similar solidarity and academic discipline.

After earning his A.B. from Cornell in 1909, Callis entered the University of Chicago, completing an M.D. in 1910 and additional graduate work in pathology. He interned at Provident Hospital in Chicago—the first Black-owned hospital in the United States—and went on to teach medicine at Howard University and later at Freedmen’s Hospital. In 1919 he joined the staff of Howard’s Department of Anatomy and Physiology, where he trained a generation of Black physicians who would practice across the Jim Crow South and in the newly developing urban hospitals of the North. In March of 1914,he was elected as Vice President of Upsilon Sigma Kappa. 

By the 1920s and 1930s, Callis had become one of the most respected Black physicians in the nation. He served as Medical Inspector for the Veterans’ Administration and was later a member of the Maryland Board of Medical Examiners. A quiet but exacting clinician, he blended public health advocacy with social consciousness, believing that racial uplift required both intellectual rigor and community service.

He married Myra Colson, with whom he shared a long partnership devoted to education and civic improvement. In his later years, Dr. Callis practiced medicine in Albany, Maryland, continuing to counsel young Alpha men and medical students. He died in 1974 at the age of 87, the last surviving founder of Alpha Phi Alpha.

Legacy

Dr. Henry Arthur Callis is remembered as both a pioneer physician and a visionary social thinker. His life bridged the post-Reconstruction generation and the modern civil rights era, modeling the creed he once wrote for the fraternity he helped to found: “Manly Deeds, Scholarship, and Love for All Mankind.” His personal story—rooted in enslavement, faith, intellect, and organization—mirrors the larger arc of Black professional advancement in the twentieth century.