Page 13 - Florida Sentinel 1-30-18

National
Last Illegal Slave Ship May Have Been Found In Alabama
New York Detective Found Guilty After Sending Innocent Man To Jail
A ‘Bomb Cyclone’ storm blew through much of the nation in 2018 and now may have revealed the wreckage of the last illegal Slave Ship, the Clotilda. The ship’s owner kidnapped the 110 Africans and transported them to Mobile, AL on a bet just before the Civil War. Those transported wanted the ship’s owner to pay their way back home, however when he and the government refused, they were sold land and developed ‘Africatown’.
Roosevelt McCoy was falsely arrested by Det. Kevin Desomeau and his partner, Sasha Dorboda was found guilty of perjury last Wednesday.
QUEENS, NY —— Queens ju- rors on Wednesday convicted a NYPD detective from Long Is- land of perjury at a trial on charges that he arrested an inno- cent man on drug trafficking charges and lied about it under oath.
Det. Kevin Desormeau, 34, is scheduled to be sentenced on March 21 and faces up to 7 years in prison for his convic- tions on charges of first-degree perjury, official misconduct and making a punishable false writ- ten statement, said Queens Dis- trict Attorney Richard A. Brown in a statement.
The innocent man spent seven weeks in Rikers Island, ac- cording to reports.
Desormeau and his partner Sasha Cordoba arrested 48- year-old Roosevelt McCoy in
2014, claiming he was dealing crack near Yogi’s Restaurant in Jamaica, Queens. The officer al- leged to have found seven grams of cocaine in his waistband after handcuffing him. After video sur- veillance showed McCoy inside the restaurant playing pool the entire time detectives said he was dealing, the case was dismissed in March 2016.
The New York Daily News reports the video also showed the two detectives ap- proach McCoy while he was playing pool, Neve taking a bag from McCoy filled with $300 in cash and both detectives escort- ing him outside the restaurant.
After the case was thrown out, McCoy filed a lawsuit against the city and the two detectives. He received a $547,000 settle- ment November 2017.
MOBILE, AL —- The ille- gal slave ship the Clotilda may have been found in Ala- bama where the family of the man that was behind the transport of the 110 people from the west coast of Africa still live.
The last American vessel to illegally bring African slaves to the U.S. nearly 160 years ago, may have been found in the Tenslaw Delta in Mobile, Alabama.
Although it is not certain that it is the vessel, the Clotilda, the remnants of a dated ship were exposed after the ‘Bomb Cyclone’ blew out 2 1/2 feet of water and left the remnant of a ship exposed.
The Clotilda was once be- lieved to be lost forever, but Ben Raines, a reporter with AL.com, thinks he has finally found its wreckage.
The Clotilda, which was retrofitted from a former tim- ber cargo ship into an illicit human trafficking vessel, car- ried 110 African slaves from what is now the west African nation of Benin into Mobile Bay in about 1860. But shortly after delivering the captives to nearby planta- tions, the captain of the 86- foot schooner steered it to a secluded spot and set it on fire, in an attempt to destroy any evidence of the illegal voyage, according to Raines.
Joycelyn Davis said news of the possible discov- ery of the ship has triggered a wave of complicated emo- tions for her and her family. Davis, 41, is a sixth genera-
tion descendant of the people who were transported on the ship, who are now referred to as the Clotilda Africans.
"It's overwhelming," she said. "To think of those 110 plus people that were taken away from their home, across the ocean to America. ... It makes me sad."
The slave trade was out- lawed during the administra- tion of President Thomas Jefferson in 1807 — 53 years before the Clotilda touched American soil — though slavery remained legal until after the Civil War with the passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865. And it was on a BET that the ship's owner, Timothy Meaher, hired Capt. William Forster to smuggle a ship- ment of slaves into the South.
Meaher, a wealthy and re- spected businessman was an ardent proponent of slavery and was convinced he could slip a cargo ship past port of- ficials without any repercus- sions.
It worked, although histo- rian Sylviane Diouf said in her book, Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America, the journey in- cluded an attempted mutiny by the crew.
"To know that it was all because of a bet. ... That kind of sucks," Davis said.
Those who survived the treacherous voyage were sur- reptitiously put to work on
plantations in the Mobile area shortly before the Civil War broke out.
Following the war, Diouff writes, the freed men and women tried to get first, Meaher, then the govern- ment to arrange their return to their home in Africa, but both refused. Instead, Mea- her sold them land on which they established a commu- nity still known as Africa- town, three miles north of downtown Mobile.
Diouf writes: "They ruled it according to their custom- ary laws, continued to speak their own languages-which they taught their children- and insisted that writers use their African names so that their families would know that they were still alive.
"Cudjo Lewis, the last survivor of the Clotilda died in 1935.”
Historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. says their descen- dants, including Davis, are the only group of African Americans who can trace their history to the actual slave ship that carried them to the U.S. as well as their an- cestral home in Africa.
Raines says through- o u t history, plantation own- ers have made attempts to pretend the Clotilda incident never happened. "So finding the ship and being able to tie it to [the descendants'] expe- rience, could be a very pow- erful thing and go a long way toward healing those wounds."
Shootout At Public Intersection Leads To One Arrest
PENSACOLA, FL — Police have arrested one man and are seeking another after a shoot- ing last Monday afternoon at a crowded public intersection.
Video footage captured on a nearby driver's dashcam shows a silver Lexus pulling up to the intersection and suspect, iden- tified as Jonathan James Harris, 27, leans out the win- dow and begins shooting at a vehicle also stopped at the same intersection.
The video then shows Har- ris fleeing the area as someone from the other vehicle jumps out and returns fire.
Escambia County Sheriff's Office Chief Deputy Chip Simmons said in a press con- ference Tuesday that an esti- mated 10 to 12 rounds were fired during the exchange, some of which lodged into a ve- hicle that had two children in- side.
Authorities have arrested Jeremy Olds, 30, and
Jonathan Harris is being sought for the shooting at the public intersection after the in- cident was caught on another driver’s dashcam.
charged him with one count of possessing a firearm as a con- victed felon. Police believe Olds is the suspect in the video who returned gunfire.
Simmons said at the press conference that ECSO does not believe the shooting is gang-re- lated at this time, but it does appear to be drug-related.
He said an investigation has shown that one of the vehicle's' occupants owed the other car's occupants money.
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