Africatown
America's Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Tabor debuts with an eye-opening and often gripping history of more than 100 enslaved West Africans brought to America aboard the Clotilda in 1860 and the Alabama community they created. Highlighting the links between slavery and modern-day environmental racism, Tabor recounts the ship's illegal voyage from the kingdom of Dahomey (present-day Benin), which occurred more than 50 years after the transatlantic slave trade was abolished in the U.S., and details the founding of "African Town" by newly emancipated Clotilda survivors after the Civil War. During the Reconstruction era, the U.S. government failed to provide former slaves with their promised "40 acres and a mule," setting the stage, Tabor argues, for decades of economic insecurity exacerbated by disenfranchisement, segregation, and racial violence. In the early 20th century, diseases ran rampant in Africatown and the "Black wards" of Mobile, Ala., which lacked plumbing and sewage infrastructure. In the 1950s and '60s, paper mills and other industrial plants built on the outskirts of Africatown gave off a "putrid smell," discriminated against Black employees, and polluted the region's air and water. More optimistic notes are struck in Tabor's descriptions of Zora Neale Hurston's visits in the late 1920s to interview Cudjo Lewis, a Clotilda survivor, and the 2019 discovery of the ship's wreckage. Exhaustive research, pointed analysis, and poignant character sketches make this an essential study of racism in America.
