This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. Today, a story about how American racism tore a family apart,

and how Pope Leo the 14th 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 Salney 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 Creel did all the work of explaining.

Edward Passé Blanc, White Passing. A century later, Susan set out to find the white family

Edward built in Chicago and to see whether what racism had broken could be put back together.

Her piece in the New York Times is called A Family Secret No More.

Susan Salney, welcome to fresh air. Oh, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Take me to the moment you saw the headline about the new Pope. I was at home in Washington, D.C., and I saw this news in, like, a lot of America, I was stunned.

And I'm in touch with a lot of people in New Orleans over different social media channels or

text threads. And immediately, I saw an eruption of excitement. And I figured that's completely

normal for a city as Catholic as New Orleans, you know.

But what I began to see is that, hey, everybody, he's got roots here. He's creole.

And I thought, Tanya, you know the amount of misinformation.

But that same night, a historian in New Orleans, a very well-known researcher who helped me on the story, who went on to do that, and the Archdiocese of New Orleans confirmed that news.

So it was an amazing feeling.

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