Africatown: The Last Slave Ship and the Community That Would Not Disappear

In July of eighteen sixty, a schooner called the Clotilda sailed into Mobile Bay carrying one hundred ten people stolen from the Yoruba-speaking region of West Africa, in what is now Benin and Nigeria. The transatlantic slave trade had been a federal crime for fifty-two years. The men who financed the voyage, led by a plantation owner named Timothy Meaher, were never prosecuted. The ship was burned shortly after landing to destroy the evidence. For more than a century and a half, its wreck lay somewhere in the mud of the Mobile Delta.

The people aboard were sold. After the Civil War ended, they were free, but they had no money, no land, and no way home to a continent they had last seen as children or young adults. So they did something else. They pooled their wages from years of post-war labor, bought land together on the north side of Mobile, and built a town. They called it Africatown. They elected their own leaders. They established a church and a school. They governed themselves.

One of the Clotilda's survivors, a man named Kossula, known in America as Cudjoe Lewis, lived until July of nineteen thirty-five. He was approximately ninety-four years old. Zora Neale Hurston traveled to Africatown in nineteen twenty-seven and spent weeks interviewing him, recording his account of the Middle Passage, of the raid on his village, of the people he watched die, of everything that came after. She wrote it all down in a manuscript she called Barracoon. Publishers rejected it in the nineteen thirties. They wanted her to remove Lewis's dialect, to smooth his voice into something more comfortable for white readers. She refused. The manuscript sat in an archive for eighty years. It was finally published in two thousand eighteen. It remains the only firsthand account of a transatlantic Middle Passage survivor recorded by a trained American writer.

In May of two thousand nineteen, archaeologists confirmed the wreck of the Clotilda beneath the Mobile Delta mud. The community its survivors founded is still there. Africatown today faces industrial pollution from neighboring facilities and decades of underinvestment. The descendants of the Clotilda's captives have been fighting on the same ground since eighteen sixty.