Pope's legacy tied to race, Chicago's Black community
Pope Leo XIV and I are both descendants of the Great Migration.
Our grandparents journeyed to Chicago from the South as part of a wave of Black families seeking a better life in the North. His mother’s Creole people hailed from Louisiana. Mine moved from Tennessee and Georgia. We’re both native South Siders.
This does not mean the pontiff can come to the mythical cookout that Black folks fervently pass out invitations to like a deck of Spades cards for any white person deemed cool. But his background tells the story of complicated racial identities in the U.S., multiculturalism and Black Catholics in Chicago.
Robert Francis Prevost’s selection as pope quickly unearthed genealogy records about the 69-year-old’s family. His maternal grandparents Joseph Martinez (born in Haiti or the Dominican Republic) and Louise Baquie, are described as Black or "mulatto" and lived in a historic Afro Creole Catholic ward in New Orleans.
The family understandably today doesn’t identify as Black, and it’s unclear whether conversations about Creole heritage took place at the kitchen table among the three Prevost brothers while growing up in Dolton. Curiously, the Vatican biography of the pope described his mother Mildred with Spanish roots. Her 1912 Chicago birth certificate listed her as white, which seemingly reveals that her parents used their light complexions to racially pass upon moving here, perhaps as a strategy for survival under the brutality of racism.
"The historian in me would say confidently that we can set aside the question of whether he [the pope] knows or acknowledges or embraces this history and just look at sheer archival historical facts that his grandparents were categorized according to the racial regimes of the day as mulatto and Black," said Matthew J. Cressler, author of “Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration.”
"And of course, in a context of the U.S where a one-drop rule made anyone who had certain African ancestry categorized as Black, legally speaking, we can say that's his history," he said.
Chicago just might be the Blackest Catholic city in the U.S.
Jean-Baptiste Point Du Sable, the first non-Native permanent settler in Chicago, was of African ancestry and Catholic.
In 2019, the late Pope Francis advanced Augustus Tolton for sainthood. Born into slavery, Tolton was the first openly Black priest in the U.S. and settled in Chicago. (The Healy brothers preceded him but passed as white, another example of leaving Black identity behind.) Tolton conducted Mass in the basement of the Old St. Mary’s Church in the late 1800s, and the archbishop granted him jurisdiction over all Chicago Black Catholics.
At the turn of the 20th century, a small Black Catholic population existed — including some of my forebears. Similarly to the pope, part of my family story began before the official start of the Great Migration. My great-great-grandmother Bettie and her daughter Florence moved to Chicago from Tennessee. They arrived here Catholic.
Later, fed up with the racist South, my grandfather moved in with them as a teenager, which led him to embrace Catholicism. In 1935, his sister Martha, 14, visited for the summer, and devout Aunt Florence influenced her. Aunt Martha returned to Nashville, changed her middle name from Ritter to Rita, after the saint, and declared herself no longer a Baptist. She eventually made her permanent home on the South Side; Aunt Martha and my grandfather joined the now-closed St. Thaddeus Church off 95th Street.
The Great Migration brought Catholics from the Mississippi Delta, but mostly Black migrants hadn’t been exposed to Catholicism. Cressler said Catholic infrastructure dominated the South and West sides. White priests and nuns asked themselves if they should abandon their parishes for the suburbs or close their doors to migrants.
"There was a third option, which was 'what if we open our doors to migrants, invite them in and actually actively go out into Black communities and try to convert folks to Catholicism through Catholic school and missionary work,' " Cressler said.
Black parishes included St. Ambrose, St. Anselm (where my father attended), St. Elizabeth, Corpus Christi and Holy Angels. Thus a segregated Black Catholic experience that embraced "authentic Blackness" emerged. Cressler writes about the Rev. George Clements aligning Black Catholic activists with Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers. By 1975, 80,000 Black Catholics lived in Chicago — the second-largest Black Catholic community in the country, higher than New Orleans, and only second to a Louisiana county. Cressler said nationally, the Black Catholic population grew more than 200% between 1910 and 1970.
"Two things are happening at once. You're having this period of tremendous growth as folks are kind of becoming Catholic for the first time. But you also have this kind of shift in the center of gravity in the Black Catholic community in the United States. For centuries the gravity had been coastal communities," Cressler said.
Back then, if you were looking for the Blackest parish in the country, it would be Holy Angels led by Clements. Today one of the biggest is the Rev. Michael Pfleger’s St. Sabina in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood.
The selection of a U.S.-born pontiff shocked the world. Cressler said there’s no better place than him being from Chicago because it challenges the image of the Catholic experience as white and from Boston or New York. Chicago and the Prevost family background tap into something quintessentially American.
"Chicago has got this rich, multiethnic, multicultural, Catholic landscape. If you're at St. Stanislaus, you feel like Catholicism is Polish. And if you're at St. Sabina, you think Catholicism is Black. You can be in a Mexican parish, you can be in an Italian parish," Kessler said.
This is the legacy Pope Leo XIV is connected to.
Natalie Y. Moore is a senior lecturer at Northwestern University.
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