How a single decision made a century ago split a family by race
6/3/202644 min
Pope Leo XIV’s Creole family roots inspired New Orleanian journalist Susan Saulny to research her Creole great-uncle who moved to Chicago, identified himself as white and never returned. She describes her journey to reunite her family. Her piece in the New York Times is called "A Family Secret No More."
Also, TV critic David Bianculli reviews the Netflix series ‘The Boroughs.’
See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.
NPR Privacy Policy
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
A grassy green lawn might look nice, but it's gonna eat up resources like drinking water and the gas you put in the mower.
Speaker 10:06
You can do a solid for the environment by ditching even just some of your lawn and replacing it with a wildlife-friendly garden.
Speaker 00:15
Life Kit has tips to get you started. No green thumb required. Listen to the Life Kit podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Tonya Mosley· Host0:24
This is Fresh Air. I'm Tonya Mosley. Today, a story about how American racism tore a family apart and how Pope Leo XIV was the catalyst for bringing them together. Last spring, when the news broke that the newly elected pope had Creole roots in New Orleans and that his own grandparents had quietly become a white family in Chicago, journalist Susan Saulny recognized the story immediately. Her family had lived a version of it. Her grandfather, George, was a Black bricklayer who raised his children in New Orleans. His brother, Edward, was Black too, but a shade lighter, light enough to leave for Chicago in the early 1920s, remake himself as a white man, and never come back. Susan grew up with just one picture of him, a young man, barely 19, propped on her grandfather's china cabinet. Five words in Creole did all the work of explaining, "Edward, passe blanc," white passing. A century later, Susan set out to find the white family Edward built in Chicago and to see whether what racism