Pope's Creole Ancestry Includes Racial Restrictions and Urban Renewal Neighborhood Destruction

 

The Augustinian cardinal Robert Prevost, just elected as Pope Leo XIV, his chosen name as Bishop of Rome, is the first American pope and the first of African descent since the fifth century. The pope is from Chicago, a Great Migration destination city, and was born in Bronzeville, a Black enclave once known as “the Harlem of the Midwest.” All four of Pope Leo XIV’s maternal great-grandparents were “free people of color” in Louisiana based on 19th-century census records, Jari Honora, a New Orleans, a historian at the Historic New Orleans Collection, a French Quarter museum, has found. As part of the melting pot of French, Spanish, African, and Native American cultures in Louisiana, the pope’s maternal ancestors would be considered Creole.

Creoles, also known as “Creole people of color,” have a history almost as old as Louisiana. While the word Creole can refer to people of European descent born in the Americas, it commonly describes mixed-race people of color. Many Louisiana Creoles were known in the 18th and 19th centuries as “gens de couleur libres,” or free people of color. Many were well educated, French-speaking and Roman Catholic.

Honora and others in the Black and Creole Catholic communities say the election of Leo is just what the Catholic Church needs to unify the global church and elevate the profile of Black Catholics whose history and contributions have long been overlooked. While it’s not known how Leo identifies himself racially, his roots bring a sense of hope to African American Catholics. “When I think about a person who brings so much of the history of this country in his bones, I really hope it brings to light who we are as Americans, and who we are as people of the diaspora,” Kim R. Harris, associate professor of African American Religious Thought and Practice at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, said. The Pope's official Vatican biography has nothing about African American or Creole ancestry, and his brother, John Prevost, said that the family does not currently identify as Black.

Leo, who has not spoken openly about his roots, may also have an ancestral connection to Haiti. His grandfather, Joseph Norval Martinez, may have been born there, though historical records are conflicting. Martinez’s parents - the pope’s great-grandparents - were living in Louisiana since at least the 1850s, he said.

Andrew Jolivette, a professor of sociology and Afro-Indigenous Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, did his own digging and found the pope’s ancestry reflected the unique cultural tapestry of southern Louisiana. The pope’s Creole roots draw attention to the complex, nuanced identities Creoles hold, he said.“There is Cuban ancestry on his maternal side. So, there are a number of firsts here and it’s a matter of pride for Creoles,” said Jolivette, whose family is Creole from Louisiana. “So, I also view him as a Latino pope because the influence of Latino heritage cannot be ignored in the conversation about Creoles.” Most Creoles are Catholic and historically it was their faith that kept families together as they migrated to larger cities like Chicago, Jolivette said.

The former Cardinal Robert Prevost’s maternal grandparents - identified as “mulatto” and “Black” in historical records - were married in New Orleans in 1887 and lived in the city’s historically Creole Seventh Ward. In the coming years, the Jim Crow regime of racial segregation rolled back post-Civil War reforms and “just about every aspect of their lives was circumscribed by race, extending even to the church,” Honora said.

The pope’s grandparents migrated to Chicago around 1910, like many other African American families leaving the racial oppression of the Deep South, and “passed for white,” Honora said. The pope’s mother, Mildred Agnes Martinez, who was born in Chicago, is identified as “white” on her 1912 birth certificate. The pope’s grandparents’ old home in New Orleans was later destroyed, along with hundreds of others, to build a highway overpass that obliterated much of the largely Black neighborhood in the 1960s.

A former New Orleans mayor, Marc Morial, called the pope’s family’s history, “an American story of how people escape American racism and American bigotry.” As a Catholic with Creole heritage who grew up near the neighborhood where the pope’s grandparents lived, Morial said he has contradictory feelings. Morial said the new pontiff’s maternal family’s shifting racial identity highlights “the idea that in America people had to escape their authenticity to be able to survive.”

Shannen Dee Williams, a history professor at the University of Dayton, said she hopes that Leo’s “genealogical roots and historic papacy will underscore that all roads in American Catholicism, in North, South, and Central America, lead back to the church’s foundational roots in its mostly unacknowledged and unreconciled histories of Catholic colonialism, slavery and segregation.” “There have always been two trans-Atlantic stories of American Catholicism; one that begins with Europeans and another one that begins with Africans and African-descended people, free and enslaved, living in Europe and Africa in the 16th century,” she said. “Just as Black history is American history, (Leo’s) story also reminds us that Black history is, and always has been, Catholic history, including in the U.S.”

Harris said the pope’s genealogy got her thinking about the seven African American Catholics on the path to sainthood who have been recognized by the National Black Catholic Congress, but haven’t yet been canonized. Pierre Toussaint, a philanthropist born in Haiti as a slave who became a New York City entrepreneur and was declared “Venerable” by Pope John Paul II in 1997.

Reynold Verret, president of Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans, the only historically Black Catholic university, said he was “a little surprised” about the pope’s heritage. “It’s a joyful connection,” he said. “It is an affirmation that the Catholic Church is truly universal and that (Black) Catholics remained faithful regardless of a church that was human and imperfect. It also shows us that the church transcends national borders.”

Read the May 10, 2025 Washington Post article.

Read the May 8, 2025 New York Times article.

Read the May 9, 2025 Word in Black article.

(Image by pikisuperstar on Freepik.com.)

Association of Historic Redlining and Present-Day Health in Baltimore

 

"Association of historic redlining and present-day health in Baltimore," by Huang SJ, & Sehgal NJ (2022).  PLoS ONE 17(1): e0261028. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0261028.

In the 1930s, the government-sponsored agency Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) - created as part of the New Deal in 1933 - categorized neighborhoods by investment grade along racially discriminatory lines, a process known as redlining. Although other authors have found associations between HOLC categories and current impacts on racial segregation, analysis of current health impacts rarely use these maps.

A study released in 2018 found that 74% of neighborhoods that HOLC graded as high-risk or "hazardous" are low-to-moderate income neighborhoods today, while 64% of the neighborhoods graded "hazardous" are minority neighborhoods today. "It's as if some of these places have been trapped in the past, locking neighborhoods into concentrated poverty," said Jason Richardson, director of research at the National Community Reinvestment Corporation (NCRC), a consumer advocacy group.

Fifty-four present-day planning board-defined community statistical areas are assigned historical HOLC categories by area predominance. Categories are red (“hazardous”), yellow (”definitely declining”) with blue/green (“still desirable”/”best”) as the reference category. Community statistical area life expectancy is regressed against HOLC category, controlling for median household income and proportion of African American residents.

Red categorization is associated with 4.01 year reduction (95% CI: 1.47, 6.55) and yellow categorization is associated with 5.36 year reduction (95% CI: 3.02, 7.69) in community statistical area life expectancy at baseline. When controlling for median household income and proportion of African American residents, red is associated with 5.23 year reduction (95% CI: 3.49, 6.98) and yellow with 4.93 year reduction (95% CI: 3.22, 6.23). 

The primary policy implication is that discriminatory public or social policy - whether or not such a policy is intentionally discriminatory - in a realm such as housing can potentially have long-lasting, disparate, and large impacts on health. Additionally, contemporary African American activists and organizations in the 1930s presciently recognized the discriminatory impacts of how HOLC made its policy decisions: members of marginalized and/or impacted communities should have control over every major policy-making process.

Since many of these issues are structural and historical, health interventions that do not focus on disparate health outcomes risk being “weighed down” by structural problems that predispose a population to worse health. If we take health equity and disparities research seriously, we should be examining the possibility of interventions that attempt to tackle some of these structural factors, including the possibility of reparations. What Link and Phelan propose as “fundamental causes” of health disparities - such as a lack of flexible resources of money, knowledge, social connections, and political power - may have even more fundamental causes rooted in power hierarchies such as racial, class, and gender subordination.

Results add support that historical redlining is associated with health today. Even time-limited urban changes can have long-lasting cumulative effects. Michaels and Rauch found that the differential collapse of Western Roman urbanization in Britain and France in the 6th century CE differentially impacted the spatial efficiency of urbanization even 1500 years later in the 21st century. Similarly, evidence supports that redlining still has cumulative impacts on various social factors today. Aaronson et al. found that living in close proximity on two sides of differently graded borders - as represented in the 1930s HOLC security maps - is strongly associated nation-wide with increased residential racial segregation from the 1930s to today. The effect on residential racial segregation was particularly strong from 1930-1970 and the effect size began to decrease after 1970. Aaronson et al. provide additional support that maps were likely drawn with race in mind: only areas marked category D had a primarily Black population in the 1930s. In addition to increased segregation, Aaronson et al. found support for reductions in home ownership, house values, and credit scores throughout the 20th century that are maintained even today nearly a century later. They also found evidence of “yellow-lining”: areas marked as category C also had disparate current outcomes when compared to higher rated areas. Using a different methodology, Appel & Nickerson found that redlined neighborhoods had lower home prices in 1990 compared to surrounding areas, and that these discriminatory effects remained even after nearly 60 years. The presence of these discriminatory effects can be compounded across time: Massey et al. found that Black residents of redlined neighborhoods face greater barriers to residential mobility than white residents that negatively impacts Black residents’ social and economic well-being.

Read the full-text report.

Book Review: "Patchwork Apartheid: Private Restriction, Racial Segregation, and Urban Inequality"

Patchwork Apartheid: Private Restriction, Racial Segregation, and Urban Inequality by Colin Gordon. Paperback / Ebook, $37.50 284 pages. Russell Sage Foundation: 2023.  ISBN:978-0-87154-554-1.

For the first half of the twentieth century, private agreements to impose racial restrictions on who could occupy property decisively shaped the development of American cities and the distribution of people within them. Racial restrictions on the right to buy, sell, or occupy property also effectively truncated the political, social, and economic citizenship of those targeted for exclusion. In Patchwork Apartheid, historian Gordon examines the history of such restrictions and how their consequences reverberate today. 

Drawing on a unique record of property restrictions excavated from local property records in five Midwestern counties, Gordon documents the prevalence of private property restriction in the era before zoning and building codes were widely employed and before federal redlining sanctioned the segregation of American cities and suburbs. This record of private restriction - documented and mapped to the parcel level in Greater Minneapolis, Greater St. Louis, and two Iowa counties - reveals the racial segregation process both on the ground, in the strategic deployment of restrictions throughout transitional central city neighborhoods and suburbs, and in the broader social and legal construction of racial categories and racial boundaries.

The author also explores the role of other policies and practices in sustaining segregation. Enforcement of private racial restrictions was held unconstitutional in 1948, and such agreements were prohibited outright in 1968. But their premises and assumptions, and the segregation they had accomplished, were accommodated by local zoning and federal housing policies. Explicit racial restrictions were replaced by the deceptive business practices of real estate agents and developers, who characterized certain neighborhoods as white and desirable and others as black and undesirable, thereby hiding segregation behind the promotion of sound property investments, safe neighborhoods, and good schools. 

These practices were in turn replaced by local zoning, which systematically protected white neighborhoods while targeting “blighted” black neighborhoods for commercial and industrial redevelopment, and by a tangle of federal policies that reliably deferred to local and private interests with deep investments in local segregation. Private race restriction was thus a key element in the original segregation of American cities and a source of durable inequalities in housing wealth, housing opportunity, and economic mobility.

Patchwork Apartheid exhaustively documents the history of private restriction in urban settings and demonstrates its crucial role in the ideas and assumptions that have sustained racial segregation in the U.S. into the twenty-first century.

The author Gordon is a Professor at the University of Iowa.

Read the RSF Russell Sage Foundation article.

Source: Read the Google Books overview.

Obituary: L. Clifford Davis, Civil Rights Lawyer & Judge, 100

 

Davis was a civil rights lawyer in the 1950s who helped integrate Texas public schools that had resisted the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning the principle of “separate but equal.” He recalled assisting Thurgood Marshall, then the chief of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, with the legal work supporting Brown v. Board of Education, which ended with a unanimous 1954 US Supreme Court decision in which the justices ruled that segregated public schools were unconstitutional.

After graduating from Howard University School of Law in 1949, Davis practiced civil rights law in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, one of nine Black lawyers in the entire state. Seeing a greater need for his services in Texas, where racial segregation was more prevalent, he moved to Texas. He became licensed in Texas in 1953, and in 1954, moved to Fort Worth, where he was one of only two Black lawyers in the city.

In 1955, Davis was the lead attorney in a lawsuit, Jackson v. Rawdon, seeking the admission of several Black students to public schools in Mansfield, a Fort Worth suburb that was then a farming community. A federal appeals court judge ordered that the schools integrate. Despite that ruling, and despite the US Supreme Court’s earlier decision in Brown, segregationists in the district fiercely opposed the mandate.

As the new school year began in 1956, mobs tried to prevent Black students from entering the local high school. A Black student was hung in effigy from a noose downtown. Other effigies were hung at the school entrance and from a flagpole. Gov. Allan Shivers, a Democrat who had denounced the Brown decision, dispatched the Texas Rangers. At one point, according to an account in the New York Times, an Episcopal minister attempted to quell the mob, remarking that it was difficult to “put the Bible’s ‘love thy neighbor’ together with this crowd.” “This ain’t a ‘love thy neighbor’ crowd!” one of the White resisters yelled back. Davis conceded it was simply too dangerous to send Black students into Mansfield High School. “All we were asking them to do was to just follow the law,” he told the Dallas Morning News in 2003. “That’s all. The appeals court ordered the [trial] judge to follow the law, that’s all. He entered the integration order, but we couldn’t go into the schools. It would have been totally unsafe for us to go.”

In 1959, Davis filed Flax, et al. v. Potts, another federal civil rights suit, which led to the desegregation of the Fort Worth Independent School District. He was lead attorney on many noteworthy cases over his career, including the race discrimination class action suit against General Dynamics, In the 1960s he became one of the first Black lawyers to join the Tarrant County Bar Association and in 1983, he was first appointed and then elected to the Texas Criminal District Court No. 2 district court bench, becoming one of the first Black state district judges in Tarrant County, where he served on the bench until 1988.

Davis received numerous awards from other social organizations. He was recognized by his peers in 1997 when he received the Tarrant County Bar Association's highest award and was inducted into the National Bar Association Hall of Fame. He was also recognized by the NAACP and awarded the “William Robert Ming Award” for his efforts with their legal affairs.

Read the February 21, 2025 Washington Post article.

Read the obituary by the L. Clifford Davis Legal Association.