Alabama’s Gulf Coast is a popular tourist destination, attracting nearly eight million visitors each year. But as these sunbirds flock towards the state’s beaches and casinos, they’re driving past a unique piece of American culture: the historic district of Africatown, located just a few miles north of Mobile.
Africatown was founded by a group of 32 West Africans, all of whom had been transported to the United States during our country’s last known transport of slaves. The United States had officially outlawed the trans-Atlantic slave trade by 1807, but due to the massive profits involved, human traffickers never really abandoned the treacherous Middle Passage. That was the case in 1860, when a group of of Alabama landowners bet each other to see if they could evade federal authorities, and import a new batch of slaves directly from Africa. These men pooled their money to hire a crew and re-fit a lumber ship called Clotilda, then set off for the coast of Benin. Once there, they negotiated with a local leader to purchase 110 human beings for $100 each.
The Clotilda managed to evade patrol steamers on its departure from Africa, but a few months later, it was spotted during the approach to Mobile Bay. In an attempt to evade capture, the Clotilda was towed upriver in the dead of night, and scuttled to destroy the evidence. The captive slaves were quickly offloaded, distributed to partners in the venture, or just resold to other area landowners. But just a few years later, at the end of the Civil War, most of these emancipated slaves managed to gather back together. The community continued to grow, while still preserving their own cultural traditions, and by 2018 Africatown included more than 2000 residents— with over 100 of them being direct descendants of Clotilda survivors.
And then in 2018, a group of researchers and archaeologists from the University of Southern Mississippi actually discovered the lost remains of the Clotilda. In a quest that would’ve made Clive Cussler proud, a local reporter named Ben Raines was the driving force behind the expedition. Raines had researched the community for years, working extensively with Africatown elders to pinpoint the ship’s locations based on oral histories which had been passed down through the generations.
I’m ashamed to admit that I hadn’t heard of Africatown before last year, when I scored a copy of Nick Tabor’s amazing book about the real-life archaeological adventure of Raines and company. But the community’s history had actually been chronicled nearly 100 years earlier, when Zora Neal Hurston interviewed the last known Clotilda survivor for her book “Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo.”
Clearly, I’ve got some more reading to do.
But isn’t that the best thing about finding a good book? It always makes you want to pick up another.