The genealogy of Pope Leo XIV leads directly to the old St. Landry Parish steamboat port of Washington, showing not only his own complex ancestry but that of hundreds of families with mixed heritages, many of whom prospered in South Louisiana.
As a treatise by LSU’s Michael Taylor points out, gens de couleur libre, free Black people, “enjoyed a relatively high level of acceptance and prosperity” in Louisiana before the Civil War.
Most of them lived in or near New Orleans but “significant numbers” were also found in St. Landry Parish, “where some were plantation owners and slaveholders”…