The Slave Ship Clotilda And The Making Of Africatown Usa

Author : Natalie S. Robertson
Publisher : Praeger
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Making of AfricaTown, USA written by Natalie S. Robertson and published by Praeger. This book was released on 2008-03-30 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shows how African captives endured capture, imprisonment, the middle passage, and slavery in America only to persevere and found a free and vibrant community in America.

Author : Ben Raines
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1982136154
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.54/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Last Slave Ship written by Ben Raines and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-01-24 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Sylviane A. Diouf
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199723982
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dreams of Africa in Alabama written by Sylviane A. Diouf and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-18 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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)

Author : Charles Waters
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0593322894
Total Pages : 449 pages
Book Rating : 4.95/5 ( download)

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Download or read book African Town written by Charles Waters and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-01-04 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicling the story of the last Africans brought illegally to America in 1860, African Town is a powerful and stunning novel-in-verse. Cover may vary. In 1860, long after the United States outlawed the importation of enslaved laborers, 110 men, women and children from Benin and Nigeria were captured and brought to Mobile, Alabama aboard a ship called Clotilda. Their journey includes the savage Middle Passage and being hidden in the swamplands along the Alabama River before being secretly parceled out to various plantations, where they made desperate attempts to maintain both their culture and also fit into the place of captivity to which they'd been delivered. At the end of the Civil War, the survivors created a community for themselves they called African Town, which still exists to this day. Told in 14 distinct voices, including that of the ship that brought them to the American shores and the founder of African Town, this powerfully affecting historical novel-in-verse recreates a pivotal moment in US and world history, the impacts of which we still feel today.

Author : Sylviane A. Diouf
Publisher : Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN 13 : 0195311043
Total Pages : 369 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dreams of Africa in Alabama written by Sylviane A. Diouf and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2007-03-09 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconstructs the lives of 110 men, women, and children from Benin and Nigeria who arrived in Alabama in 1860, deported to the United States as slaves more than fifty years after the abolition of the international slave trade.

Author : Zora Neale Hurston
Publisher : HarperCollins
ISBN 13 : 006274822X
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Barracoon written by Zora Neale Hurston and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller • TIME Magazine’s Best Nonfiction Book of 2018 • New York Public Library’s Best Book of 2018 • NPR’s Book Concierge Best Book of 2018 • Economist Book of the Year • SELF.com’s Best Books of 2018 • Audible’s Best of the Year • BookRiot’s Best Audio Books of 2018 • The Atlantic’s Books Briefing: History, Reconsidered • Atlanta Journal Constitution, Best Southern Books 2018 • The Christian Science Monitor’s Best Books 2018 • “A profound impact on Hurston’s literary legacy.”—New York Times “One of the greatest writers of our time.”—Toni Morrison “Zora Neale Hurston’s genius has once again produced a Maestrapiece.”—Alice Walker A major literary event: a newly published work from the author of the American classic Their Eyes Were Watching God, with a foreword from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker, brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade—abducted from Africa on the last "Black Cargo" ship to arrive in the United States. In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation’s history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo’s firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States. In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship. Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life. During those weeks, the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo’s past—memories from his childhood in Africa, the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for selection by American slavers, the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilda, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War. Based on those interviews, featuring Cudjo’s unique vernacular, and written from Hurston’s perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her one of the preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century, Barracoon masterfully illustrates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. Offering insight into the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all, black and white, this poignant and powerful work is an invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture.

Author : James P. Delgado
Publisher : University of Alabama Press
ISBN 13 : 0817321519
Total Pages : 233 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Clotilda written by James P. Delgado and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2023-03-07 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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"--

Author : Nick Tabor
Publisher : St. Martin's Press
ISBN 13 : 1250766559
Total Pages : 266 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Africatown written by Nick Tabor and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2023-02-21 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An evocative and epic story, Nick Tabor's Africatown charts the fraught history of America from those who were brought here as slaves but nevertheless established a home for themselves and their descendants, a community which often thrived despite persistent racism and environmental pollution. In 1860, a ship called the Clotilda was smuggled through the Alabama Gulf Coast, carrying the last group of enslaved people ever brought to the U.S. from West Africa. Five years later, the shipmates were emancipated, but they had no way of getting back home. Instead they created their own community outside the city of Mobile, where they spoke Yoruba and appointed their own leaders, a story chronicled in Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon. That community, Africatown, has endured to the present day, and many of the community residents are the shipmates’ direct descendants. After many decades of neglect and a Jim Crow legal system that targeted the area for industrialization, the community is struggling to survive. Many community members believe the pollution from the heavy industry surrounding their homes has caused a cancer epidemic among residents, and companies are eyeing even more land for development. At the same time, after the discovery of the remains of the Clotilda in the riverbed nearby, a renewed effort is underway to create a living memorial to the community and the lives of the slaves who founded it.

Author : Anitra Butler-Ngugi
Publisher : Capstone
ISBN 13 : 1669074781
Total Pages : 33 pages
Book Rating : 4.86/5 ( download)

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Download or read book After the Clotilda written by Anitra Butler-Ngugi and published by Capstone. This book was released on 2024 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2019, the remains of the Clotilda were discovered in the Mobile River. The discovery of the last slave ship helped document the history of Africatown--a community built by Africans who had been illegally brought to Mobile, Alabama, on that ship in 1860 and enslaved. But for more than 160 years, the people of Africatown have been preserving their own history and culture--and fighting for a hard-won community that has been encroached upon for decades. In this book, students will learn about the survivors of the Clotilda, the community they built, and the people's resilience in the face of environmental racism.

Author : Emma Langdon Roche
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 190 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Historic Sketches of the South written by Emma Langdon Roche and published by . This book was released on 1914 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: