The Last Slave Ship: The Clotilda and Memories of Africa in America

The schooner Clotilda probably looked like the slave ship Armistead in this rendition,
according to scholars studying and documenting the recovery and authentication of The Last Slave Ship to make the horrific "middle passage" across the Atlantic. Photo rendition from Ben Raines, in Anniston/Gadsden (Alabama) Rel-Time News, July 2019. 

The wreck recovered, May 22, 2019. It was
"remarkably in tact," according to an NPR story.

In 1860, the wooden ship Clotilda illegally transported 110 people from what is now the west African nation of Benin to Mobile, Alabama. The Clotilda was then taken into delta waters north of the port and burned to avoid detection. The Slave Trade had been prohibited  in 1808, but it continued robustly up to the Civil War, mostly with Northern acquiescence. In fact, Northern industrialists ran a lucrative trade out of New York City harbor for years, and helped fund the Clotilda run. Scholars believe the Clotilda is the last slave ship to make it to America, and their human cargo were the last Africans to be enslaved here in the so-called "land of the free." This is the story of the African past and the American experience torn asunder by the institution of slavery. 

The director of the Alabama Historical Commission, Lisa D. Jones, called the discovery  "an extraordinary archaeological find,” noting that "the voyage represented one of the darkest eras of modern history and is a profound discovery of the tangible evidence of slavery." It is also a profound discovery of the meaning and importance of the African heritage of American slaves, the ways they were forced to adapt, the impact of family separations, the hardships, the dreams of freedom, and the memories and traditions of Africa they held so closely through the cruelty of human bondage.

"Tangible evidence," if any more is needed. The trafficking in human beings and its dire impact and consequences constitute a horrifying thread running through the social fabric of America up to the present, and yes, it is well-documented. 

The human dimensions of the story are painful, tragic, and to its credit the Smithsonian recognized its significance in its announcement of the Clotilda's discovery:  

"One hundred and fifty-nine years ago, slave traders stole Lorna Gale Woods' great-great grandfather from what is now Benin in West Africa. Her ancestor, Charlie (Cudjo) Lewis [born Oluala Kossolo] was brutally ripped from his homeland, along with 109 other Africans, and brought to Alabama on the Clotilda, the last known slave ship to arrive in the United States. Today, [May 22, 2019] researchers confirmed that the remains of that vessel, long rumored to exist but elusive for decades, have been found..." The Smithsonian Institution,  a major partner in the ship's recovery and authentication.   

Cudjo and another Clotilda
survivor in 1914 (wikipedia).

The amazing remarkable thing is that the survivors of the Clotilda who remained in Alabama formed their own community, Africatown, in Mobile, after the Civil War. Cudjo Kossolo Lewis was said to be a chief and the oldest person on the ship. It was Cudjo and thirty-one other Africans who founded Africatown. They were joined by other continental Africans and formed a community that continued to practice many of their West African traditions and the Yoruba language for decades. 

According to an excellent article in Wikipedia, a spokesperson for the community said Cudjo (pictured left) died in 1935.  Redoshi, another captive on the Clotilda, was sold to a planter in Dallas County, Alabama, where she became known as Sally Smith. She married, had a daughter and lived to 1937. Another survivor, Matilda McClear, lived until 1940. By then there were eight surviving members of the last slave ship from Africa. (Wikipedia, note 2 below, and the book Dreams of Africa in America by Sylviane Anne Diouf, Oxford U Press, 2007..

Some 100 descendants of the Clotilda still live in Africatown, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2012, five years before the Clotilda was fully recovered and its history confirmed.  We can imagine the joy this community experienced when the discovery made the news, and it made a lot of news. “The excitement and joy is overwhelming,” says Lorna Woods, great-great granddaughter of Cudjo, in a voice trembling with emotion. She is 70 years old now. But she’s been hearing stories about her family history and the ship that tore them from their homeland since she was a child in Africatown."

An interesting note on the authentication of the slave trade and its monstrous trafficking in human lives is that the anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Huston made her own significant discovery in about 1925: She found Cudjo and interviewed him about his experiences. Unfortunately, she had trouble finding a publisher for this story, even after publication of her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. The interviews were finally published in 2018 in Hurston's book titled Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo."  I just discovered that Hurston's title was the name of the prison and holding pen where the slaves were kept before their forced trip to America. The content and the significance of Hurston's interviews, lost for decades, were revived again after the Clotilda's resurrection from the dead.  

Soon scheduled for release, on January 25, the investigative journalist Ben Raines, who worked for years on recovering the Clotilda, will tell his story in The True Story of How Clotilda was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning. For some time, it appears, the major institutional partners in the project, the Alabama Historical Society, the National Geographic, SEARCH Inc, the Smithsonian, and others, neglected to mention the work Ben Raines with the support of the University of Southern Mississippi researchers had done in making this discovery possible. It was trial and error for a long time, but Raines persevered and he deserves recognition for his obsessive work in pinning down the Clotilda's location. I'm glad he's telling his story, and I look forward to reading this book.

"Either the United States will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States." W.E.B. Dubois (1868-1963)

Sources/Notes

1.  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/clotilda-last-known-slave-ship-arrive-us-found-180972177/

2.  https://www.npr.org/2021/12/22/1067078342/wreckage-of-last-slave-ship-clotilda-alabama

3.  https://www.abebooks.com/Dreams-Africa-Alabama-Slave-Ship-Clotilda/31057664499/bd?cm_mmc=ggl-_-US_Shopp_Textbook-_- The story of the last Africans forced and trafficked to the US, based on their own stories, memories of Africa, and the tragic experience of being captured and enslaved in the U.S. in 1860, just 1 year before the outbreak of Civil War.   

4. https://www.al.com/news/anniston-gadsden/2019/07/alabama-files-legal-action-to-help-protect-the-clotilda.html   

5. https://www.al.com/news/2019/05/clotilda-the-last-american-slave-ship-has-been-found-alabama-historical-commission-announces.html

6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clotilda_(slave_ship)#:~:text=The%20schooner%20Clotilda%20(often%20misspelled,23%20ft%20(7.0%20m)

7. https://www.history.com/news/zora-neale-hurston-barracoon-slave-clotilda-survivor   Hurston's unpublished manuscript of Barracoon is held by the Spingarn Center at Howard University. The importance of preserving historical documents revealed! 

8.  https://www.history.com/news/us-illegal-slave-trade-civil-

9.  https://www.al.com/news/mobile/2019/05/reporter-raines-credited-for-role-in-clotilda-search.html. 

10. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674330511,  W.E.B.DuBois's  Suppression of the Slave Trade to the USA, 1638-1870, his pioneering research and dissertation at Harvard, where he was the first African-American to receive a PhD.  The slave trade actually continued after it was legally prohibited, but DuBois's study and his subsequent research and writing remain an important contribution to the extensive scholarship on slavery and the African-American experience.  See also  https://www.jstor.org/stable/2294050   The writings of DuBois are best of all, starting with The Souls of Black Folks.