Susan Saulny

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. George’s brother, Edward, was Black too, but light enough to leave for Chicago in the early 1920s and start a new life as a white man.