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Yahoo
6 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
The Devil's Bargain: How the slave trade built New Orleans
This photo shows the old slave auction block where enslaved people were sold in the St. Louis Hotel at 621 St. Louis St. in the French Quarter. The block rested under recessed arches and between columns in the hotel's rotunda. (Credit: From the Historic New Orleans Collection; gift of Samuel Wilson Jr.) NEW ORLEANS – Stretching 3 miles from the Mississippi River to City Park, Esplanade Avenue is today a leafy thoroughfare lined with 19th-century mansions, restaurants, bars, and other businesses. In the evenings, tourists make their way across the avenue from the French Quarter, drinks in hand, ready to take in some jazz at the clubs on Frenchman Street. These visitors — or the current residents, for that matter — have little reason to give any thought to what once happened here in centuries past. The streetscape then could have included a cortege of enslaved Black people being forced-marched in chains from far away or from ships at the nearby docks or unloaded from wagons, all to be delivered to what amounted to urban prison camps. Before the Civil War, the blocks on and surrounding Esplanade Avenue were home to dozens of slave pens, stockyard-like enclosures of dirt lots surrounded by high brick walls to deter escape and shield public view. Inside were men, women, and children warehoused until they could be sold, either directly from the pens or on the auction blocks somewhere in the prosperous city of New Orleans. The pens were 'foul places, attractive to flies and lice and vermin, hazy with acrid smoke from cheap pork cooked over open flames, and reeking of sweat and urine and feces and garbage,' historian Joshua D. Rothman said in his book 'The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America.' It was the stench and health concerns — not the inhumanity of the slave trade itself — that had prompted Quarter residents to push for the pens to be moved away from their fine homes into the neighborhoods along Esplanade. The prisoners, many torn from family and friends and forced to walk or endure ship passage for hundreds of miles from the Upper South to serve new masters, were crowded inside by overseers concerned only with keeping them healthy and fit enough to bring top dollar on the market. Passersby 'might hear the cries of small children' or 'the muted anguish of adults who are there, who are suffering what we call today PTSD or some sort of traumatic injury, who are trying to wrap their heads around what's happening,' Calvin Schermerhorn, history professor at Arizona State University said in an interview. An alert visitor can find a historical marker on the neutral ground near Esplanade Avenue and Chartres Street, marking the city's connection to the brutal slave trade. Another marker across the intersection toward the river marks the location of the infamous slave pens where Solomon Northup, known for 'Twelve Years a Slave,' was sold into slavery. 'There's a sin, a fearful sin, resting on this nation, that will not go unpunished forever,' Northup said in his 1853 memoir of his life as a free man sold into slavery. 'There will be reckoning yet … It may be sooner or it may be later, but it's a coming as sure as the Lord is just.' That accounting has yet to fully come to a city more associated with letting the good times roll than dealing with past sins. Outside of historians, academics and the generational memories of Black New Orleanians, relatively few people understand the enormity of New Orleans' involvement in the slave trade, which helped build generational wealth for white residents and made the city the most financially powerful and influential in the South. Gregg Kimball, Senior Consulting Historian for the Shockoe Institute in Richmond, Va., maintains that the slave trade was part of the 19th century U.S. economic boom 'that really made the United States a world power. It basically created American capitalism. That's a big deal. Right?'' For New Orleans, sugar and slaves were the driving forces for an economy that also thrived from the global cotton trade and its position at the mouth of the Mississippi River. 'It's those three intertwined. It's New Orleans's status as not only a port city, but as a place where banking is based and where trading happens in sugar and cotton and slaves,' New Orleans historian Erin Greenwald said. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX Slavery is in the very bones of New Orleans, where the essential protective levees, streets and core buildings were constructed by enslaved workers. Captive Black laborers helped grow and harvest the lucrative sugar and cotton crops, loaded the yield onto the ships for export and even served as collateral for plantation owners' bank loans to expand their land holdings and buy more enslaved workers. From the early 1800s until Union Troops occupied the city about a year after the beginning of the Civil War, New Orleans was known as the 'slave market of the South.' An estimated 135,000 people were bought and sold in the city and its immediate environs at more than 50 documented places. These are the same places where residents and tourists today celebrate Mardi Gras, sleep in luxury hotels, drink in dive bars, and eat at fine restaurants. In 2025, there is little public acknowledgement of the atrocities of slavery beyond a few mostly low-key historical markers and some local tours designed to go beyond the usual sightseeing fare. The history of how slavery made New Orleans the city it is today rarely intrudes on the daily awareness of most people. Greenwald said she values what she gets from reading academic histories. 'It's great. But that's not what's going to penetrate the consciousness,' she said. 'It's just not. It's expensive, it's jargony. … Historians are speaking generally to each other. You have to have a lot of prior knowledge to access a lot of the narrative in academic history.' There is also the city's reluctance to confront its painful past, focusing instead on tourism-friendly narratives and laissez les bons temps rouler marketing. 'There's a powerful impulse to keep slavery in the rearview mirror, to present a story about the United States that is one of progress and improvement,' Rothman, chair of the history department at the University of Alabama, said in an interview. 'People like to think slavery was terrible, but we fixed it. In fact, we've forgotten about it.' To those who know, the city's slave history is everywhere: former slave quarters operating as apartments and short-term rentals, historic structures built with slave labor and a culture of music and art that wouldn't exist without the influence and contributions of enslaved residents. But it isn't easy to track down the markers, read the academic research and all the other things that provide a thorough understanding of what happened. In an upcoming series of articles, Verite News hopes to make the city's connection to slavery better known and understood by residents who are not familiar with stories and connections held dear by descendants of the enslaved and to the millions who come to visit 'the city that care forgot.' The historical marker for the St. Louis Hotel, the most famous slave auction site in New Orleans, is placed at the back of the luxurious Omni Royal Orleans hotel, next to a loading dock. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people walk past it each day without pausing to read about what took place there. The marker itself seems to downplay the connection to the slave market and its inhumanity. 'The luxurious St. Louis Hotel included a bank, ballroom, shopping arcade, and trading exchange,' the marker boasts. 'Six days a week, under the hotel's domed rotunda, auctioneers sold land and goods,' before what almost seems like an aside of 'as well as thousands of enslaved people.' Slavery-related markers on The Moonwalk by the Mississippi River, The Merieult House on Royal Street, The Cabildo in Jackson Square, slave pen locations at Esplanade and Chartres, the New Orleans Slave Depot at Common and Baronne streets, and Congo Square are also easy to overlook. And even for those who do stop and read, the official city guidance and literature provides little context for what it means and what the reader should think or do about it. While other cities around the world have benefited from building museums, permanent exhibits, and other educational structures on painful events, including the Holocaust, race massacres, and the atrocities and injustices of the Jim Crow era, New Orleans has mostly remained on the sidelines. The removal of Confederate monuments from prominent positions in the city sparked a great outcry in 2017 from those who said they saw it as 'erasing history,' but the recognition of enslaved people's contributions to building and molding New Orleans has not received similar support. 'There had been this resistance, I think, in New Orleans generally to recognizing darker sides of history that complicate the fun-time celebration, exotic nature tourism of the city,' said Greenwald, who put together 'Purchased Lives,' an extensive exhibit on slavery that was on display at The Historic New Orleans Collection in 2015. 'New Orleans is not alone in that, but they might be one of the worst examples of covering up things that aren't part of their tourism narrative, and that has changed.' Many of the slave markers were placed by a city commission appointed to mark the New Orleans Tricentennial in 2018. Freddi Evans, a New Orleans author and educator who was on the commission, said in an interview that the markers have had a positive effect. 'Well, I don't know if it has an impact on the people who are coming here as tourists, but it has an impact on the people who are here, the citizens,' she said, including the descendants of enslaved people who have taken it upon themselves to keep their history from being erased. The New Orleans Tricentennial Commission does offer a slave marker tour app that provides 'an immersive and dramatic self-guided tour of sites that played an important role in the domestic slave trade of New Orleans.' Each year, over the July 4th weekend, the New Orleans MAAFA Commemoration takes place. Sponsored by the Ashé Cultural Arts Center, participants wearing white begin at Congo Square with stops at the Esplanade site, the Tomb of the Unknown Slave (next to Catholic Church on Governor Nicholls Street), and other locations. Maafa is a Kiswahili word that means 'great disaster' or 'great tragedy.' 'Hundreds of people come,' Evans said. It's one way the city can memorialize those who suffered under slavery. Harvard historian Walter Johnson has written that the whole city should be considered a memorial to slavery. 'The levee is a slave-built levee. The entire economic development of the city was premised upon slavery. All the buildings were built by enslaved people or free people of color,' Johnson told The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2017. 'You could memorialize the city of New Orleans with a million markers of which enslaved people lived there, which enslaved people worked there, which enslaved people built this.'
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
What to know about Pope Leo XIV's ancestry
Pope Leo XIV made history as the first U.S.-born pontiff. It was recently revealed that he has Louisiana Creole ancestry. Jari Honora, a family historian at The Historic New Orleans Collection, made the discovery and joins "CBS Mornings Plus" for more.
American Press
20-05-2025
- General
- American Press
Video of the Nottoway Plantation fire sparks jubilation. It's about anger and pain over slavery, too
Nottoway Plantation. (Photo courtesy of the Historic New Orleans Collection) After a fire engulfed a mansion at Louisiana's Nottoway Plantation, one of the largest remaining pre-Civil War houses in the Deep South where scores of enslaved Africans labored, video footage of the combusted landmark lit the internet ablaze with mass jubilation and consternation over the weekend. For some, it was a moment to celebrate what they saw as centuries-deferred vengeance for enslaved ancestors. There was no shortage of memes and humorous social media posts to ignite the celebrations: from video of the plantation's burning mansion set to the R&B hit song 'Let It Burn' by Usher to other footage with the volume of burning wood cranked all the way up to trigger a cozy autonomous sensory meridian response. 'Went and watched (Nottoway Plantation) burn to the ground!' historian Mia Crawford-Johnson wrote in the Instagram caption of a grinning selfie taken Thursday across from the burned mansion near the banks the Mississippi River. For others, it was a moment of sadness. Nottoway Plantation has for years been a venue for weddings and other events celebrating cherished milestones. Not to mention, proof of the ingenuity and skill of the enslaved people held on the plantation has been reduced to ashes. Preservationists say the jubilant reactions to the charred mansion reflect the trauma and anger many people, especially Black Americans, still carry over the history and legacy of chattel slavery in the United States. Antebellum era plantations were built under grueling conditions on the backs of enslaved people, and many are now sites of honor on the National Register of Historic Places. Some plantations try to ignore their past But some plantations also de-emphasize or overlook their full histories, foregoing mentions of slavery altogether. That is why the 'good riddance' sentiment seemed to outweigh expressions of grief over Nottoway Plantation, which makes no mention of enslaved former inhabitants on its website. Many sites of enslavement in the U.S. have been repurposed as places that actively participate in the erasure of their history, said Ashley Rogers, executive director of the Whitney Plantation Museum, located 40 miles (65 kilometers) west of New Orleans. She said the burning of Nottoway is not actually part of the movement for preservation, since nothing was truly being done on the property to tell its full history. 'It was a resort,' Rogers said. 'I don't know that it being there or not being there has anything to do with how we preserve the history of slavery. They already weren't.' Joseph McGill, executive director of the Slave Dwelling Project, a nonprofit focused on helping the U.S. acknowledge its history with slavery, said the reaction from the Black community about Nottoway burning represents years of complicated emotions related to plantations. But as a preservationist, McGill said it is unfortunate Nottoway burned down, even if it was failing at telling history. 'I would like to see buildings preserved so that those buildings could tell the stories of all the people who inhabited those spaces,' McGill said. 'We have been failing at that, but at least when the buildings are there the opportunity always exists to do the right thing.' Nottoway Plantation became a resort and event venue Before the fire, Nottoway was a resort and event venue, and its website described it as 'the South's largest remaining antebellum mansion.' Iberville Parish President Chris Daigle called the plantation 'a cornerstone of our tourism economy and a site of national significance.' The sprawling property exists on a former sugar plantation owned by sugar baron John Hampden Randolph. Located about 65 miles (105 kilometers) northwest of New Orleans, the 53,000-square-foot (4,924-square-meter) mansion had a three-story rotunda adorned with giant white columns and hand-carved Italian marble fireplaces, according to a description on its website. A brochure advertises 40 overnight rooms, a honeymoon suite, a lounge, fitness center, outdoor pool and cabana, among other resort features. In 1860, 155 enslaved people were held at the property, National Park Service records show. After the blaze, which drew an emergency response from nearly a dozen fire departments from surrounding towns, the property's owner said the fire had led to a 'total loss' and that he hoped to rebuild the mansion. Rogers said it is unfortunate Nottoway's mansion burned down, as it did serve as a testament to the 'skill of enslaved craftspeople and free people of color who built it and who did a lot of the incredible design work that was inside of that building.' There are plenty of plantations, unlike Nottoway, that do not allow weddings or other celebratory events. For example, the Whitney, which documents slavery at a pre-Civil War plantation, draws tens of thousands of visitors annually and is known for centering the stories of enslaved people. The Nottoway fire has also restarted a public discourse over plantations. Rogers, the Whitney museum director, said this is not new discourse, but can feel like such because there are not many places where productive conversations can be had about slavery and how to tell its history. Racism and slavery dominate cultural debates How, where and when to talk about the history of U.S. racism and slavery has dominated political and cultural debates in recent years. An executive order issued in March by the Trump White House seeks to root out 'divisive, race-centered ideology' in the Smithsonian Institution, which operates a broad range of cultural centers in Washington. Among the order's targets is the National Museum of African American History and Culture, a popular Smithsonian attraction that chronicles chattel slavery, Jim Crow segregation and its lingering effects. Relatedly, plantations and other national historic sites with ties to civil rights have long been places where visitors and descendants of enslaved people go to learn about the past. But they are also places where visitors may encounter naysayers and deniers challenging the tour guide's presentation about slavery. Rogers said there are plenty of others sites besides Nottoway accurately telling Black history that need to be preserved. 'I don't think one plantation burning down is going to change how we talk about slavery in this country,' she said. 'All it does is exposes wounds that are already there.'
CNN
15-05-2025
- General
- CNN
How a working-class Chicago suburb and a tight-knit Catholic parish shaped Pope Leo XIV
Religion The PopeFacebookTweetLink Follow In one of Chicago's south suburbs, while other boys were playing cops and robbers, the future Pope Leo XIV would pretend to hold Mass in the basement of his family's small brick home, reading from scripture and distributing disk-shaped candy wafers to his two older brothers. 'Some people said, 'That guy's going to be pope one day,'' his eldest, Louis Prevost, 73, recalled with a laugh. When the weather permitted, a young Robert Francis Prevost would play priest on the top step of a stoop, presiding over an outdoor Mass with a congregation made up of a handful of neighborhood children sitting on the lower steps, said Holly Boblink, 71, who lived on the same block. The little boy who last week became the new leader of the world's 1.4 billion Catholics grew up in an ethnically mixed and devout family in the tight-knit, working-class village of Dalton, Illinois. Their hub was a now-shuttered Catholic parish and school in a dense metro area that reflected not only the rich cultural tapestry of the US Catholic Church but of America itself. A deep sense of community and compassion helped shape the man who would succeed the popular Pope Francis at a time of turbulence for both the church and the nation, according to immediate relatives and others who grew up with him. 'None of us was wealthy,' said Marianne Angarola, 69, who attended Catholic grammar school with the future pope. 'But we never felt like we were wanting or needing anything. We were cared for and provided for. And we felt protected and loved.' When Prevost, 69, stepped out last Thursday onto the balcony overlooking St. Peter's Square to greet Vatican City's adoring throngs – just the second pope from the Americas, after his most immediate predecessor, and the first from the United States – he was nearly 8,000 miles from the railroad tracks that crisscross the streets of the village he once called home. In a place where a stranger might just as soon tell you their Catholic parish as their neighborhood, the Prevosts were regulars at St. Mary of the Assumption Parish in the Riverdale area on Chicago's South Side. The father of the boy who would become pope, Louis Prevost, was of French and Italian descent, and his mother was of Spanish descent, according to the Vatican. 'My dad's parents came over on a boat. They were orphans and so there you can't really find roots for them,' said the middle of the three Prevost brothers, John. Their mom, Mildred Martinez Prevost, was born in Chicago in 1912, not long after her parents migrated from New Orleans, said a family historian at the Historic New Orleans Collection who shared his research with CNN. 'The family were free people of color prior to the Civil War. When they moved to Chicago between 1910 and 1912, they 'passed' into the White world,' Jari C. Honora said, citing a 1900 Census record listing Mildred Prevost's parents as Black residents of the Louisiana city's 7th Ward, a cultural melting pot. Louis and Mildred grew up in Chicago – dad on the South Side, mom on the North Side – and met at DePaul University, John Prevost said. 'They used to joke through the years (that) my dad met my mom when he was working on his master's degree, and he gave her one of the questionnaires that he was working on,' he said. Louis Prevost became an educator and school superintendent in Cook County. His wife was a librarian and active in parish life as a member of the St. Mary Altar and Rosary Society who played the organ, lent her 'operatic voice' to the choir and established the school's first library in a small basement room, her middle son and former students who remember the family said. Mildred Prevost also was one of the 'hot lunch ladies' who volunteered to make sloppy joes for students twice a month and was part of the St. Mary's Players, performing in 'The Music Man' and 'Fiddler on the Roof.' Among the recipes she contributed to a cookbook published by parishioners was one for the puffy fried dough known as beignets, a mainstay in New Orleans, Angarola recalled. 'She was a fun person,' recalled another parishioner, Noelle Neis, 69. The Prevost home already was bustling with two little boys when the youngest son, Robert Francis, was born on September 14, 1955, in Chicago. Dolton's economy relied heavily on now-closed steel mills and factories on the outskirts of the village. Noisy freight trains crawled through day and night, stalling vehicle and pedestrian traffic at railroad crossings and dictating the pace of life for many residents. 'We would get caught by the train and we wouldn't get into Mass until the homily – the sermon – was concluding, and this did not make my mother happy,' Angarola recalled. Prev Next 'I remember going to church and you could see the train in the distance and you'd have to beat the train so you wouldn't be late for church,' Neis said. 'There were two big sets of tracks. I'm sure the Prevosts had to go over those same tracks. My mother insisted we leave one hour early for a 3-mile drive to church.' Nattily attired, the Prevost family sat in the same pew – right behind Neis' family – every Sunday at St. Mary of the Assumption, so named for the belief Jesus' mother's body was 'assumed' into heaven upon her death. 'We would hear his mom singing, so we knew they were there,' Neis said. Louis occasionally was a lector, reading designated verses aloud from the Bible during the first part of Mass. The brothers were all altar boys. At one point, the Prevost family got an organ, and the future pope took the six free lessons that came with its purchase, John Prevost recalled. He then taught the middle brother how to play, a nod to his skills as both a quick study and a natural leader. 'I never really thought of him as my little brother,' Prevost, who still speaks with his younger sibling by phone almost every day, said last week. 'He was always Rob.' The youngest Prevost son also was a standout student, especially in religion class. Every school day at St. Mary of the Assumption began with Mass before students had breakfast at their desks, since there was no cafeteria. Some students would get frustrated when the nuns lined them up to answer questions about the Catholic Catechism. The future Pope Leo, by contrast, was the smartest and best-behaved, Angarola recalled. 'It was a little torturous,' she remembered. 'There were a lot of sighs. Like, you know, 'Here we go.' Our religion teacher in second grade … she would use (him) as an example: 'You know, Robert Prevost, he would never sigh,' like we were doing.' Indeed, Prevost's path to the priesthood began at an early age. 'I do remember when he was in eighth grade, order after order after order came to the house to talk up their order,' John Prevost recalled of the recruiting tactics of the various religious communities that train and manage priests. 'What made him choose the Augustinian order, I couldn't tell you, but maybe it was the sense of community.' Robert Prevost soon left home to attend St. Augustine Seminary High School, just around and up the Lake Michigan shore, and only returned for summers and holidays, his brother said. 'When we dropped him off for freshman year of high school, the drive home was very sad,' said John Prevost, who went on to serve as a parish choir conductor and organist and to work as a teacher and principal in Catholic schools. 'No one was going to talk him out of it … 'Somewhere the seed was planted and it grew.' The future Pope Leo later attended Villanova University, an Augustinian school in eastern Pennsylvania, and the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, where he received a Master of Divinity in 1982 before earning a Doctor of Canon Law degree at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Rome. He then spent much of his working life in Peru, where he was a missionary, leading the Augustinian seminary in Trujillo. He returned to Illinois in 1999 to lead the Order of Saint Augustine's Midwestern province, and, starting in 2001, led the Augustinians globally — based in Rome, but traveling widely. In 2014 he returned to Peru — where he became a naturalized citizen, receiving a Peruvian passport — and in 2015 was named bishop of Chiclayo. In 2023, Prevost returned to the Vatican, where Francis tapped him to lead the department that oversees the selection of new bishops. The boy whose deep sense of community and compassion was molded by his experiences in the village of Dolton was made a cardinal later that year. A week ago, he was chosen as the 267th pope of the Roman Catholic Church. 'I think the world is in pain right now, and I think many people, myself included, want to contribute thoughtfully to getting to a place where all mankind is treated equally and that basic necessities, at the very least, are met,' Angarola said as she considered the South Side kid she once knew now at the helm of such a mission. 'And wouldn't this be incredible,' she said, 'if this was the purpose of the path that got established for Pope Leo XIV to actually be able to make it happen.' CNN's Eric Bradner, Whitney Wild, Andy Rose, Taylor Romine, Matthew Rehbein, Michelle Krupa, Elizabeth Wolfe and Christopher Lamb contributed to this report.
CNN
15-05-2025
- General
- CNN
How a working-class Chicago suburb and a tight-knit Catholic parish shaped Pope Leo XIV
Religion The PopeFacebookTweetLink Follow In one of Chicago's south suburbs, while other boys were playing cops and robbers, the future Pope Leo XIV would pretend to hold Mass in the basement of his family's small brick home, reading from scripture and distributing disk-shaped candy wafers to his two older brothers. 'Some people said, 'That guy's going to be pope one day,'' his eldest, Louis Prevost, 73, recalled with a laugh. When the weather permitted, a young Robert Francis Prevost would play priest on the top step of a stoop, presiding over an outdoor Mass with a congregation made up of a handful of neighborhood children sitting on the lower steps, said Holly Boblink, 71, who lived on the same block. The little boy who last week became the new leader of the world's 1.4 billion Catholics grew up in an ethnically mixed and devout family in the tight-knit, working-class village of Dalton, Illinois. Their hub was a now-shuttered Catholic parish and school in a dense metro area that reflected not only the rich cultural tapestry of the US Catholic Church but of America itself. A deep sense of community and compassion helped shape the man who would succeed the popular Pope Francis at a time of turbulence for both the church and the nation, according to immediate relatives and others who grew up with him. 'None of us was wealthy,' said Marianne Angarola, 69, who attended Catholic grammar school with the future pope. 'But we never felt like we were wanting or needing anything. We were cared for and provided for. And we felt protected and loved.' When Prevost, 69, stepped out last Thursday onto the balcony overlooking St. Peter's Square to greet Vatican City's adoring throngs – just the second pope from the Americas, after his most immediate predecessor, and the first from the United States – he was nearly 8,000 miles from the railroad tracks that crisscross the streets of the village he once called home. In a place where a stranger might just as soon tell you their Catholic parish as their neighborhood, the Prevosts were regulars at St. Mary of the Assumption Parish in the Riverdale area on Chicago's South Side. The father of the boy who would become pope, Louis Prevost, was of French and Italian descent, and his mother was of Spanish descent, according to the Vatican. 'My dad's parents came over on a boat. They were orphans and so there you can't really find roots for them,' said the middle of the three Prevost brothers, John. Their mom, Mildred Martinez Prevost, was born in Chicago in 1912, not long after her parents migrated from New Orleans, said a family historian at the Historic New Orleans Collection who shared his research with CNN. 'The family were free people of color prior to the Civil War. When they moved to Chicago between 1910 and 1912, they 'passed' into the White world,' Jari C. Honora said, citing a 1900 Census record listing Mildred Prevost's parents as Black residents of the Louisiana city's 7th Ward, a cultural melting pot. Louis and Mildred grew up in Chicago – dad on the South Side, mom on the North Side – and met at DePaul University, John Prevost said. 'They used to joke through the years (that) my dad met my mom when he was working on his master's degree, and he gave her one of the questionnaires that he was working on,' he said. Louis Prevost became an educator and school superintendent in Cook County. His wife was a librarian and active in parish life as a member of the St. Mary Altar and Rosary Society who played the organ, lent her 'operatic voice' to the choir and established the school's first library in a small basement room, her middle son and former students who remember the family said. Mildred Prevost also was one of the 'hot lunch ladies' who volunteered to make sloppy joes for students twice a month and was part of the St. Mary's Players, performing in 'The Music Man' and 'Fiddler on the Roof.' Among the recipes she contributed to a cookbook published by parishioners was one for the puffy fried dough known as beignets, a mainstay in New Orleans, Angarola recalled. 'She was a fun person,' recalled another parishioner, Noelle Neis, 69. The Prevost home already was bustling with two little boys when the youngest son, Robert Francis, was born on September 14, 1955, in Chicago. Dolton's economy relied heavily on now-closed steel mills and factories on the outskirts of the village. Noisy freight trains crawled through day and night, stalling vehicle and pedestrian traffic at railroad crossings and dictating the pace of life for many residents. 'We would get caught by the train and we wouldn't get into Mass until the homily – the sermon – was concluding, and this did not make my mother happy,' Angarola recalled. Prev Next 'I remember going to church and you could see the train in the distance and you'd have to beat the train so you wouldn't be late for church,' Neis said. 'There were two big sets of tracks. I'm sure the Prevosts had to go over those same tracks. My mother insisted we leave one hour early for a 3-mile drive to church.' Nattily attired, the Prevost family sat in the same pew – right behind Neis' family – every Sunday at St. Mary of the Assumption, so named for the belief Jesus' mother's body was 'assumed' into heaven upon her death. 'We would hear his mom singing, so we knew they were there,' Neis said. Louis occasionally was a lector, reading designated verses aloud from the Bible during the first part of Mass. The brothers were all altar boys. At one point, the Prevost family got an organ, and the future pope took the six free lessons that came with its purchase, John Prevost recalled. He then taught the middle brother how to play, a nod to his skills as both a quick study and a natural leader. 'I never really thought of him as my little brother,' Prevost, who still speaks with his younger sibling by phone almost every day, said last week. 'He was always Rob.' The youngest Prevost son also was a standout student, especially in religion class. Every school day at St. Mary of the Assumption began with Mass before students had breakfast at their desks, since there was no cafeteria. Some students would get frustrated when the nuns lined them up to answer questions about the Catholic Catechism. The future Pope Leo, by contrast, was the smartest and best-behaved, Angarola recalled. 'It was a little torturous,' she remembered. 'There were a lot of sighs. Like, you know, 'Here we go.' Our religion teacher in second grade … she would use (him) as an example: 'You know, Robert Prevost, he would never sigh,' like we were doing.' Indeed, Prevost's path to the priesthood began at an early age. 'I do remember when he was in eighth grade, order after order after order came to the house to talk up their order,' John Prevost recalled of the recruiting tactics of the various religious communities that train and manage priests. 'What made him choose the Augustinian order, I couldn't tell you, but maybe it was the sense of community.' Robert Prevost soon left home to attend St. Augustine Seminary High School, just around and up the Lake Michigan shore, and only returned for summers and holidays, his brother said. 'When we dropped him off for freshman year of high school, the drive home was very sad,' said John Prevost, who went on to serve as a parish choir conductor and organist and to work as a teacher and principal in Catholic schools. 'No one was going to talk him out of it … 'Somewhere the seed was planted and it grew.' The future Pope Leo later attended Villanova University, an Augustinian school in eastern Pennsylvania, and the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, where he received a Master of Divinity in 1982 before earning a Doctor of Canon Law degree at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Rome. He then spent much of his working life in Peru, where he was a missionary, leading the Augustinian seminary in Trujillo. He returned to Illinois in 1999 to lead the Order of Saint Augustine's Midwestern province, and, starting in 2001, led the Augustinians globally — based in Rome, but traveling widely. In 2014 he returned to Peru — where he became a naturalized citizen, receiving a Peruvian passport — and in 2015 was named bishop of Chiclayo. In 2023, Prevost returned to the Vatican, where Francis tapped him to lead the department that oversees the selection of new bishops. The boy whose deep sense of community and compassion was molded by his experiences in the village of Dolton was made a cardinal later that year. A week ago, he was chosen as the 267th pope of the Roman Catholic Church. 'I think the world is in pain right now, and I think many people, myself included, want to contribute thoughtfully to getting to a place where all mankind is treated equally and that basic necessities, at the very least, are met,' Angarola said as she considered the South Side kid she once knew now at the helm of such a mission. 'And wouldn't this be incredible,' she said, 'if this was the purpose of the path that got established for Pope Leo XIV to actually be able to make it happen.' CNN's Eric Bradner, Whitney Wild, Andy Rose, Taylor Romine, Matthew Rehbein, Michelle Krupa, Elizabeth Wolfe and Christopher Lamb contributed to this report.
