Since moving to Westport in 2003 with newborn twins, John Suggs has been an active community member.
He served on the Representative Town Meeting, and ran for 1st selectman as an independent in 2017.
John Suggs
He’s been involved with Assumption Church, Little League baseball and youth basketball. His family hosted A Better Chance scholars.
Professionally, Suggs worked in asset management analysis, public policy and community development,
Yet some of his most satisfying achievements have come in forensic genetic genealogy. His Family Orchard business helps adult adoptees, and birth parents and siblings, find each other.
One search took 9 years to solve. It involved a birth mother of an abandoned 3-month old — who was then 91 years old.
Twelve years ago, adult adoptee Morgan Zo Callahan asked Suggs to help him find his birth father.
Morgan Zo Callahan
Suggs spent 7 years on the search. Along the way he discovered that Callahan — who had been raised white — was fathered by a Black Haitian named Lionel Durand.
Durand was no longer alive. he died when Callahan was 17.
But he had led a remarkable life. Lionel Durand was the son of Haiti’s last pre-World War II diplomatic consul to France, and a member of the French Resistance in the first 2 years of German occupation.
He was captured twice — and escaped twice from the Gestapo. He fled to the US, where he served on the French desk of Voice of America, broadcasting to occupied France.
A friend of Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, Durand went on to report from the world’s hot spots as Newsweek’s Paris bureau chief.
Lionel Durand, behind USSR Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev.
He died at just 40, after being injured by a tear gas bomb that exploded while he covered the violence in the Casbah during the Algerian War of Independence.
Durand posthumously received the George Polk Award for “best reporting, requiring exceptional courage and enterprise abroad,” from his peers at the Overseas Press Club of America.
After finding who Callahan’s father was, Suggs helped him meet members of his family.
Lionel Durand
Suggs then assisted Callahn on his first book on the subject of his search and its aftermath. It was called “Revelation and Healing: A Father and Son Reunion.” Suggs also wrote the afterword.
When the book was published, Callahan insisted that all royalties go to a Jesuit charity in Haiti.
Readers were captivated by Callahan’ story. Many urged him to write a second book — about his father.
The result — “Liberty Loving Lion: Unexpected Company of Lionel Durand” — was published last week.
Its royalties too will be donated to Faith in Action, in Haiti.
The book tells Durand’s remarkable story, often in his own strong voice.
“This book is Morgan’s tribute to his father: a man he never knew. A proud Haitian,” Suggs says.
“It is the story of Haiti, right up to this moment.
“It is also the story of his and other Black men and women fighting in the French Resistance where, because of the color of their skin, they could not easily ‘go underground’ and hide. And the Nazis had a pathological hatred and fear of Black people.”
It is a story too, Suggs adds, that will “help raise desperate funding for the people of Haiti.
“It is a story of one man’s lifetime, which took us over a dozen years to discover and write. It is a story that needs to be told.”
At last, it has been.
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