When a young Robert Francis Prevost set off in the early 1980s for Rome to take his vows as a priest, his hometown of Dolton was on the precipice of fundamental changes.
As the future Pope Leo XIV was being ordained and earning a doctorate in church law, the steel mills in Chicago were closing, instigating the decline of Dolton and its neighbors.
Good-paying jobs disappeared. Household income fell. Waves of white families left, and Black families moved into the village named for an abolitionist.
The 1980 Census identifies Dolton as overwhelmingly white — 94% — with just 3% Hispanic and 2% Black. A decade later, Black residents constituted about 40% of the town, with whites still a majority. By 2000, Dolton’s racial makeup flipped, and now the village of 21,000 is 91% Black; 1 in 5 residents live in poverty.
The election of the first U.S. pope over the global Catholic Church puts his hometown on the map, drawing pilgrims to his childhood home and old parish just inside the Chicago line and opening up a possibility to change its fortune.
Dorothy Bell moved to Dolton in 1982, the same year as Pope Leo’s ordination into the Augustinians, an order of priests dedicated to the poor and vulnerable.
Bell became the second Black person in the 200 block of East 141st Place, six houses from Prevost’s parents. And she moved in despite hesitations about Dolton’s reputation of being against anyone who wasn’t white.
“I didn’t even want to move here [at first],” Bell, 67, said. “I don’t want to move where I’m not wanted. … Dolton was so prejudiced.”
Immediately she faced racism.
A neighbor, who she later found out had originally intended to buy her house but couldn’t afford to, had regularly rifled through her and visitors’ cars. She knew this because his daughters bragged and teased Bell’s family about it.
When the same man threatened to sic the Ku Klux Klan on her, Bell called the police. To her surprise, local officers took her seriously.
But then that man, along with nearly all the rest of Bell’s white neighbors, made an exodus — better known as white flight — that was hardly unique to Dolton in the south suburbs.
“I was the second Black on the block,” Bell said. “Six months later, I woke up and everybody was gone.”
Civil rights icon and singer Mavis Staples’ parents moved to Dolton in 1987 to a split-level on 148th Street that stayed in the Staple Singers family after Oceola and Roebuck “Pop” Staples died. The house stayed in the family until 2022 when Cook County records show, Mavis Staples sold it.
Around this time, the U.S. Department of Justice sued 14 towns, including Dolton, for failing to hire Black people for city jobs. The village eventually was put under a consent decree through at least 1991, required to scrap residency requirements, advertise in publications with Black readership and publicly post the openings.
Pope Leo’s parents were still living in Dolton in 1990 when his mother died. His father bought a house in nearby Homewood in 1996, records show, but he was waked the following year at Dolton’s Opyt-Brown Funeral Home on Lincoln Avenue.
The family’s house on 141st Place was sold in 1998, just before Prevost returned from missions in Peru to lead the Augustinians’ Midwestern province in Chicago. His oldest brother had long before moved away, and his middle brother had moved to Homewood, later settling in Will County.
Anthony Sheldon grew up on the Prevosts’ old block, hanging out with Bell’s son in the house now known for raising a pope. Everybody had a backyard; lots even had swimming pools.
Now in his 30s, Sheldon has witnessed Dolton’s changes over the years, as businesses shuttered, property taxes skyrocketed and politicians siphoned cash from the taxpayers to their own pockets.
Dolton had lost brick-making, metal parts, steel, aluminum and container factories, in addition to the steel mills in surrounding towns that employed tens of thousands of people.
Newcomers like Sheldon’s family inherited this decline without new jobs to offset it.
Once a “a pillar of the community,” Dolton’s downtown Village Café served many lifelong customers, including Sheldon. But “like everything, it shut down.”
Also lacking: fresh groceries, places for kids to be kids and overdue infrastructure upgrades. The road Sheldon’s home sits on has been “breaking ankles for years,” he said.
Bell still remembers the places where she could sit down and eat or get groceries, even at chain stores.
“When I first moved here, they had everything from Harvey’s to Baker’s Square,” Bell said. But then, “it just went down.” Dolton’s median household income was $32,982 in 1986 — more than $97,000 in today’s money — compared to $57,700 today.
Without businesses and sales tax income, the taxes on Bell’s house since she bought it for $60,000 in 1982 have doubled, while the home’s value has only gone up 50%. But she gives it “another month” until she expects the pope’s history — and a potential for the home to be made into a museum — to hike property values on the street, bumping up the taxes, too.
A stop on the Underground Railroad
Three decades before the Civil War, an abolitionist named George Dolton settled where an old Indian trail now known as Lincoln Avenue crossed the Little Calumet River. He and a neighbor operated a ferry and then a bridge that became part of the Underground Railroad.
Dolton’s first post office was established in 1856, for the many Germans who immigrated roughly 100 years before Robert Prevost and his two older brothers attended St. Mary of the Assumption school.
The village grew a bevy of crops for Chicago — potatoes, asparagus, onions, sugar beets and eggplant — that would fuel packing and canning plants. Clay deposits supplied three brick companies.
Meanwhile, the Prevosts’ parish, St. Mary of the Assumption at 138th and Leyden, organized originally in 1886, Newberry Library records show. The church building the pope attended and celebrated Mass in was built in 1957 but now is vacant.
In 1900, just after the village split from what’s now Riverdale and incorporated, Dolton counted 1,229 residents, a population that doubled to about 3,000 by 1940, when, as news clippings show, onions were still farmed there. In 1960, the Census counted a whopping 18,746, all but 16 of those people white, according to the Encyclopedia of Chicago.
As newlyweds, Pope Leo’s parents, Mildred and Louis Prevost, had moved to a new brick house on 141st Place in 1949, six years before he was born. They were among thousands of Catholics streaming to postwar suburban enclaves to raise the kids who’d be known as baby boomers.
St. Mary school, where they sent their three boys, boasted 50 kids in a class, said Marianne Angarola, 69, who graduated with Pope Leo in 1969.
Families had one car that fathers would drive to work while mothers stayed home. The breadwinners, many of them veterans, worked in steel mills, the Ford plant in Chicago, the railroads and factories. The little downtown kids called ‘town’ had Horney’s Dime Store — later the Dolton Value Village — and a movie theater where kids flocked on Sundays after Mass.
“We walked everywhere,” Angarola said. “I’m sure [Pope Leo] went to town, and I’m sure he did things like go to the Dolton House, get your fries and your Green River.”
The volunteer fire department sponsored a carnival and a “mammoth Fourth of July parade through town, down Chicago Road,” Angarola said.
Dolton looks ahead
The Independence Day parade was part of Jason House’s childhood, too. House, 46, is Dolton’s newly elected mayor who moved from neighboring Riverdale when he was 8 to a community with a public pool and movie theater. Most of his public school classmates were Black.
“We have a history of hardworking people that look to elevate themselves and put themselves in a better position, and we always have taken pride in our community,” House said. “It’s close enough to the city that you can have access to all the city amenities, while at the same time having its own lane where you can have a little bit more land and a private, quiet living environment. … You can raise your families here and do it with pride.”
House replaced flamboyant mayor Tiffany Henyard, who attracted an outside investigation and federal subpoenas with her lavish spending and luxury travel on the taxpayers’ dime.
Sheldon is hoping the new attention will help shepherd in assistance for the town too, if the people now paying attention to the town for its pride rather than its woes are willing to step in.
“I’ve seen plates from everywhere come through,” Sheldon said. “If you can get this much attention off this one little house, we can get more attention and help in the neighborhoods to make them flourish. … Between Tiffany [Henyard] and the pope, we’re still missing out. [The kids] should have the best opportunities too.”
But Bell worries about what the fame that Dolton’s new favorite son could cost everyone who stayed.
She’s “got a lot of memories here” of raising her kids, two of whom have died, but as a retired nursing assistant couldn’t turn down a generous offer on her home.
“I would love to see Dolton come back, and I’d love to keep my house,” Bell said. “But I’m not gonna pray on it. … I’m just kind of scared now.”