American racism tore her family apart. Now she shares the story of their reconnection : NPR
TONYA MOSLEY, HOST: 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. 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 …
