The Clotilda and Africatown

On the night of July ninth, eighteen sixty, a two-masted schooner called the Clotilda slipped into the Mobile River after dark, carrying one hundred and ten men, women, and children purchased from the Kingdom of Dahomey at the port of Ouidah, in what is now Benin. The Atlantic slave trade had been outlawed since eighteen oh eight. The vessel had been built by a Mobile shipbuilder named William Foster, who also captained it, and the voyage had been financed by Timothy Meaher, a wealthy Mobile steamboat operator who reportedly made the voyage on a wager that he could import enslaved Africans without being caught.

The captives were offloaded in darkness and dispersed to local plantations. Foster immediately burned and scuttled the Clotilda in the delta to destroy the evidence. Meaher was arrested but never convicted. The records show no one was ever held criminally responsible for the crime.

When the Civil War ended and general emancipation came in eighteen sixty-five, many of the Clotilda's survivors pooled what earnings they could gather, hoping to buy passage home to West Africa. They never raised enough. Instead, they purchased land north of Mobile and built their own town: African Town, which is known today as Africatown. They elected their own leaders under their own laws and built a life grounded in the customs of Yoruba culture they had brought with them.

One survivor, a man named Oluale Kossola, became known in America as Cudjo Lewis. He helped found a church with other Clotilda survivors in the years after Africatown was settled; it took the name Union Missionary Baptist Church in the early nineteen hundreds. He was still alive in nineteen twenty-seven when the writer Zora Neale Hurston came to interview him over several months in Plateau, Alabama. Her manuscript, documenting his testimony in his own words, circulated unpublished for decades. It finally appeared as Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo in twenty eighteen. Cudjo Lewis died in nineteen thirty-five. For decades he was considered the last survivor of the transatlantic slave trade in the United States, until research published in two thousand nineteen found that two other Clotilda survivors had outlived him.

In May twenty nineteen, the Alabama Historical Commission officially confirmed the wreck of the Clotilda in the Mobile River, where Foster had burned it one hundred and fifty-nine years before. Africatown is three miles north of downtown Mobile. The community is still there.