Page 4 - Florida Sentinel 5-31-19

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Last Known U. S. Slave Ship, The Clotilda, Said To Have Been Discovered in Alabama
Researchers recently an- nounced they’ve located the remains of the last known ship known to bring enslaved Africans to what we now call the United States.
According to the Alabama Historical Commission, slave importing was officially banned in 1808, though an illegal trans-Atlantic slave trade continued for many years.
In 1860, 50 years after im-
porting slaves was deemed il- legal, a ship named the Clotilda illegally transported 110 people from present-day Benin on the west coast of Africa, to Mobile, Alabama. After its delivery of black people to slave owners, just one year before the Civil War, the ship was burned to destroy evidence of its illegal activity.
“The discovery of the Clotilda is an extraordinary
archaeological find,” said
Lisa Demetropoulos Jones, executive director of the Alabama Historical Com- mission, in a statement. “The voyage represented one of the darkest eras of modern history and is a profound dis- covery of the tangible evi- dence of slavery.”
As the story has been told by historian Natalie S. Robertson, the treacherous slave trade was literally a game for some. Alabama plantation owner Timothy Meaher made a bet with someone that he and his peo- ple could evade detection and bring a shipload of Africans across the ocean. And so a schooner, Clotilda, set sail.
“They were smuggling people as much for defiance as for sport,” Robertson said.
If the name Clotilda sounds familiar it’s probably because you remember when The Root founder, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., met with The Roots’ Questlove to trace his lineage back to Africa. What Gates discov- ered is that Quest’s direct ancestors were listed as being on board that very ship.
The Africans who came on the Clotilda spent the next five years as slaves during the American Civil War and were freed only after the South had lost. Because they had no means to return home to Africa, about 30 of them used the money earned working in fields, as maids and house- servants, or on ships, to pur- chase land from the Meaher family and create an all-black community still known to this day as Africatown.
This week National Geo- graphic spoke with other de- scendants of founders of Africatown about what the re-discovery of the Clotilda means to them and their community.
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