The Last Slave Ship

The Last Slave Ship PDF

Author: Ben Raines

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2023-01-24

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1982136154

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The “enlightening” (The Guardian) true story of the last ship to carry enslaved people to America, the remarkable town its survivors’ founded after emancipation, and the complicated legacy their descendants carry with them to this day—by the journalist who discovered the ship’s remains. Fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed, the Clotilda became the last ship in history to bring enslaved Africans to the United States. The ship was scuttled and burned on arrival to hide the wealthy perpetrators to escape prosecution. Despite numerous efforts to find the sunken wreck, Clotilda remained hidden for the next 160 years. But in 2019, journalist Ben Raines made international news when he successfully concluded his obsessive quest through the swamps of Alabama to uncover one of our nation’s most important historical artifacts. Traveling from Alabama to the ancient African kingdom of Dahomey in modern-day Benin, Raines recounts the ship’s perilous journey, the story of its rediscovery, and its complex legacy. Against all odds, Africatown, the Alabama community founded by the captives of the Clotilda, prospered in the Jim Crow South. Zora Neale Hurston visited in 1927 to interview Cudjo Lewis, telling the story of his enslavement in the New York Times bestseller Barracoon. And yet the haunting memory of bondage has been passed on through generations. Clotilda is a ghost haunting three communities—the descendants of those transported into slavery, the descendants of their fellow Africans who sold them, and the descendants of their fellow American enslavers. This connection binds these groups together to this day. At the turn of the century, descendants of the captain who financed the Clotilda’s journey lived nearby—where, as significant players in the local real estate market, they disenfranchised and impoverished residents of Africatown. From these parallel stories emerges a profound depiction of America as it struggles to grapple with the traumatic past of slavery and the ways in which racial oppression continues to this day. And yet, at its heart, The Last Slave Ship remains optimistic—an epic tale of one community’s triumphs over great adversity and a celebration of the power of human curiosity to uncover the truth about our past and heal its wounds.

Clotilda

Clotilda PDF

Author: James P. Delgado

Publisher: University of Alabama Press

Published: 2023-03-07

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 0817321519

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"The book documents the maritime history and the 2018/2019 archaeological fieldwork and laboratory and historical research to identify the wreck of notorious schooner Clotilda in Mobile Bay. Clotilda was owned by Alabama businessman Thomas Meaher, who, on a dare, equipped it to carry captured Africans from what is now Benin and bring them to Alabama in 1860, some fifty years after the import of the enslaved was banned. The boat carried perhaps 110 Africans, and, on approaching Mobile Bay, the captives were unloaded and dispersed by river steamer/s to plantations upriver. To hide the evidence, Clotilda was set afire and sunk. Apparently, the site of the wreck was an open secret but lost from memory for a time. Various surveys through the years failed to locate the ship. In 2018, Al.com reporter Ben Raines identified a shipwreck near Twelvemile Island, and the story attracted international attention. Researcher partners, including Delgado and coauthors in the crew, determined that this was not the Clotilda. In 2019, on another investigative mission to locate the Clotilda, Delgado and crew compared the remains of a schooner and determined that it was the Clotilda. The Alabama Historical Commission and the descendent community of Africatown, where survivors of the Clotilda made their lives post-Emancipation, are making plans for commemoration of the site and the remains of the ship, if it is possible to salvage and preserve out of water. The book takes two tacks. First it serves as a nautical biography of Clotilda. After reviewing the maritime trade in and out of Mobile Bay, it places the Clotilda within the larger landscape of American and Gulf of Mexico schooners and covers its career before being used as a slave ship. Delgado et al. reconstruct Clotilda's likely appearance and characteristics. The second tack is the archaeological assessment of the wreck. The book also places the wreck within the context of a ship's graveyard in a "back water" of the Mobile River. Delgado et al. discuss the various searches for Clotilda. Detailing of the forensic and other analyses shows how those involved concluded that this wreck was indeed the Clotilda"--

Dreams of Africa in Alabama

Dreams of Africa in Alabama PDF

Author: Sylviane A. Diouf

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2009-02-18

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0199723982

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In the summer of 1860, more than fifty years after the United States legally abolished the international slave trade, 110 men, women, and children from Benin and Nigeria were brought ashore in Alabama under cover of night. They were the last recorded group of Africans deported to the United States as slaves. Timothy Meaher, an established Mobile businessman, sent the slave ship, the Clotilda , to Africa, on a bet that he could "bring a shipful of niggers right into Mobile Bay under the officers' noses." He won the bet. This book reconstructs the lives of the people in West Africa, recounts their capture and passage in the slave pen in Ouidah, and describes their experience of slavery alongside American-born enslaved men and women. After emancipation, the group reunited from various plantations, bought land, and founded their own settlement, known as African Town. They ruled it according to customary African laws, spoke their own regional language and, when giving interviews, insisted that writers use their African names so that their families would know that they were still alive. The last survivor of the Clotilda died in 1935, but African Town is still home to a community of Clotilda descendants. The publication of Dreams of Africa in Alabama marks the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. Winner of the Wesley-Logan Prize of the American Historical Association (2007)

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