How a single decision made a century ago split a family by race

This is Ira Glass. On this American life, we tell stories about when things change. Like for this guy David, whose entire life took a sharp, unexpected, and very unpleasant turn. And it did take me a while to realize that it's basically because the monkey pressed the button. That's right.

Because the monkey pressed the button. Surprising stories every week, wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air, I'm Tanya 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 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 nineteen, propped on her grandfather's china cabinet. Five words in Creel did all the work of explaining.

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