On Pope Leo XIV's Black African "Roots"

Get the Point!

Well, after hitting the proverbial wall of exhaustion from what’s been a tough week of fighting MAGA Republicanism in Florida—all the while educating and mentoring the next generation of leaders—my strength was renewed yesterday when my Morehouse College classmate (and dear friend) Andre Kearns updated his Facebook page to note that the historic first Pontifex Maximus to hail from the United States, the newly named Leo XIV, has Haitian and Creole (Black African) roots!

I had seen headline notifications that the Papal Conclave convened in the wake of Pope Francis’s passing had yielded the first “American” Pope (which should have read “United Statesian” or “Chicago ‘Native Son’” since the late Pope Francis actually hailed from South America), but the mainstream media missed what my Morehouse Brother —a genealogist and fellow historian—noted about Pope Leo’s (nee Robert Prevost) familial history:

My, my, my!

And while scrolling on social media, I also ran across the following picture of Pope Leo and his blood brothers:

Well, the Prevost Boys resemble some of my lighter skinned relatives on my momma’s side up in Georgia, where they were enslaved while some were miscegenated through the decades…👀

Indeed, as many of my friends from Louisiana stated on social media, they knew that the new Pope and his brothers were “Brothas” the minute that they read their last name and saw family photos which are now going viral! And with a nod to levity, some asked how soon would it be before President Donald Trump and his MAGA minions would learn of the Pope’s Black African heritage and call it a “DEI hire,” especially in light of revelations that the Holy Father, while still a Cardinal, has rebuked Trump's political stances!

A few humorous responses from my Facebook share of Brother Kearns's post

Well, levity aside, it doesn't matter what a gang of ignorant bigots say about the Pope’s racial heritage because to me, I find it rich—and telling—that the first Pope from the United States is descended from captured Africans who were brought to the Caribbean and Americas to enrich European colonizers in the Western Hemisphere!

Yet and still, when the initial news blasts hailed forth, Pope Leo was quoted on the BBC news site as saying, "I was born in the United States...But my grandparents were all immigrants, French, Spanish...” True enough, but the mainstream media initially missed the fact that in this context, “French” means “Haitian,” which means “Black African,” as in the colony that gained its freedom from France in 1804 after a bloody revolt led by Toussaint L’Overtrue, Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe—the Founding Fathers of the first Free Black Republic in the Western Hemisphere!

Image of the Haitian Revolution

By nightfall, some mainstream media outlets like the NY Times, had begun to correct this initial oversight, one that was “vague” due to the Pope’s above quoted reference to his “French” ancestry—and the very real fact that more often than not in the United States, due to the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, many Louisiana Creoles (and others) with “one drop” of African blood often chose to “Passe Blanc,” or pass for white, for myriad reasons—all stemming from the painful legacy of systemic white supremacy in our country!

This morning's NY Times headlines

Now, while some folks will shrug their shoulders and ask “why does any of this matter,” the historian in me submits that an accounting of the first “this” or second “that” must ALWAYS be accurate to destroy stereotypes, for one, and to remind that when we get down to the heart of the matter, we ALL are descended from human ancestors hailing from Africa! As such, whether you're from the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions and believe that God created man and woman in the Garden of Eden, or you’re not religious and believe that humans evolved from other species, the historical, anthropological, and scientific evidence point to the objective fact that life began in Africa although some of us, including Ol’ Hobbs and Pope Leo, have more recent African ancestry than others!

Lest we forget…