Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Council of Edward-Elmhurst Health: We are DRIVEN to create a culture in which all races, ethnicities, religions, sexual orientations, physical abilities and socio-economic backgrounds can meet, share, learn and flourish in an accepting environment. By creating platforms and opportunities that allow us to come together, we can begin to know and understand each other. And through better understanding, we can effectively meet the needs of our diverse patients and deliver on our mission.

Pictured, L to R: Lynne Chester, Peggy Jackson Chase, Laura Morgan, December 2016.

Laura Morgan became fascinated with her grandfather’s story after a third-grade ancestry project. Her parents told her that her grandfather, Charles Chester, had grown up in an orphanage in Michigan.

But there was a twist.

“My mother told me that after my grandfather had died, my father asked my grandfather’s best friend about his upbringing. That friend told my father, ‘You don’t want to know,’” Morgan says.

Morgan was intrigued by the secret. What did her father “not want to know?”

Determined to find out, Morgan, system director of internal audit and compliance at Edward-Elmhurst Health, started looking into her family’s genealogy after her father died in 2015.

At first, she looked for a Charles Chester in census records in Michigan, specifically checking orphanages. She couldn’t find him. On a whim, she decided to look in Chicago. Sure enough, she found a Charles Chester born in 1908, the same year her grandfather was born, listed on the 1910 census.

He had been born in Chicago to Lulu and William Chester, the names of the parents listed on Chester’s birth certificate. The Chesters were listed in 1910 census data as ”Mu” to denote mixed race. Morgan looked further and found Lulu and William on separate census records for 1900 listed as “B” for black.

“Part of me suspected the secret was that we were part Black,” Morgan says.

Not convinced that her family would believe the story with just a piece of paper, Morgan tried to find a living member of the family who could corroborate the story. She noticed that Chester’s sister, Billie, and Billie’s family including her daughter, Peggy, lived at the same house for many years. Peggy, born in 1938, a year before Morgan’s father, could still be alive, Morgan thought.

Using the Cook County Recorder of Deeds records, Morgan was able to find a phone number she believed was Peggy’s. Morgan called the number the day after Thanksgiving 2016. A woman answered the phone.

“I asked if it was Peggy and she said ‘yes.’ I asked if her mother’s maiden name was Chester, and she said yes,” Morgan says. “I couldn’t believe that I had found her! Then I asked, ‘Did you know your mother had a brother? We didn’t know about you because he told us he grew up in an orphanage.’ Peggy responded without missing a beat: ‘That’s because he was passing.’”

Passing was a situation where a black or mixed-race person whose skin was light enough would be assumed to be white and would continue that misunderstanding by “claiming to belong to a group to which he/she was not legally assigned.” (A Chosen Exile, A History of Racial Passing in American Life, Allyson Hobbs, prologue, page 5)

“I was so excited,” Morgan says. Morgan and her sister, Lynne, visited Peggy who had pictures of Chester and his family from his youth hanging on the wall in her living room. Peggy told Morgan and her sister that Chester’s mother went through a period of grieving after Chester left to “pass.” Chester never introduced his three children to his parents. His children always believed that he grew up in an orphanage.

Charles Chester left his family as a young man and enrolled at the University of Illinois, where, Morgan speculates, he first began life passing as a white person. Living in the Morgan Park area and attending Morgan Park High School, he likely saw how white people lived and thought, ‘Why can’t I live like that, too?’”

This story and experience bring home three main themes, Morgan says.

• Loss. Her father missed out on knowing his grandparents and cousins.
• How recent slavery and Jim Crow laws really were. “When you study these things in school, they seem so far in the past. But when you can relate them to your own family and how profoundly they impacted people you knew, you realize how recently they occurred.” Morgan says.
• Our racial melting pot and the assumptions we make based upon appearances. “No one would ever suspect that I had any African American ancestry based upon my appearance,” Morgan says. “But that is not true. Would that change how people think of me? Why is this not taught in school? I think we all believe that there are a limited number of racial options (e.g., black or white) but in reality, we are all probably a mixture.”

At first, Morgan was apprehensive about how people would react to her story.

“I was excited and wanted to cherish the family history but was afraid of how my family and others would react,” Morgan says. “Mostly my family has been as interested as I was. However, my father’s sister is still alive, and she told me that she doesn’t want to know the story. She says that her father wanted to keep his upbringing a secret and she wants to honor his wishes.”

Morgan says she realizes her grandfather was able to escape structural racism by passing as white, but it came with a heavy cost.

“I feel sorry for my great-grandparents knowing that their son had three children of his own and they never got to meet them,” Morgan says. “What a loss.”