“This is like a reward from God,” a local parishioner said, as researchers unearthed more details about the lives of Leo XIV’s ancestors in the heart of the city’s Afro-Caribbean culture.
One day in June 1900, a census taker visited the New Orleans home of Joseph and Louise Martinez, Pope Leo XIV’s grandparents. They lived on North Prieur Street, just north of the French Quarter, a neighborhood considered the cradle of Louisiana’s Creole people of color.
Joseph N. Martinez was recorded as a Black man, born in “Hayti.” His wife, two daughters and an aunt, were also marked “B” in a column denoting “color or race.”
Ten years later, the census came knocking again. The family had grown — there were six daughters now. Other things changed, too: Mr. Martinez’s place of birth was listed this time as Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic. And the family’s race is recorded as “W,” for white.
That simple switch, from “B” to “W,” suggests a complex, and very American, story.
For much of the 19th century, New Orleans operated under a racial system that distinguished among white people, Black people and mixed-race Creole people like the Martinezes. But by the early 20th century, Jim Crow was the order of the day, and it tended to deal in black and white, with myriad restrictions imposed upon any person of color.
The selection of Robert Frances Prevost as the first pope from the United States, and the subsequent revelation of his Creole roots, have brought those historical realities to the fore — and an interview with the pope’s brother John Prevost, 71, connected them to the present day.
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