AFRICATOWN

Historical study of the last shipment of enslaved Africans to America, who created a thriving town outside Mobile, Alabama, after the Civil War.

As the purported last slave ship to sail from West Africa to American shores, the Clotilda, which arrived in 1860, was recovered from the Mobile Delta in 2018. As Tabor recounts, even though the trans-Atlantic slave had been illegal since 1808, the wealthy slave owner Timothy Meaher managed to purchase 110 Africans from the Kingdom of Dahomey, in present-day Benin, in 1859. Yet Meaher was never prosecuted, skirting the authorities on the cusp of the Civil War. Diligently tracing the stories of those original handful of enslaved people, the author, focusing on the story of Cudjo Lewis, “the most famous survivor of the Clotilda’s voyage,” lays out their original plan to return to Africa. When that didn’t come to fruition, they bought some land and started a town. Despite hindrances to Black voting and racist practices in Alabama, the community grew. In 1927, after visiting the town, Zora Neale Hurston “wove her research…into a sixteen-page essay” that was published in The Journal of Negro History. Though “Hurston’s original material accounted for only a small fraction of the piece,” it nonetheless brought further notoriety to the town. However, industrial development by International Paper in the 1930s, and then Scott Paper the following decade, contributed to the increasing degradation of the local environment. As the author shows, alongside ecological problems, the local residents endured ongoing poverty and political disenfranchisement. “The situation in Africatown was a crystalline example of environmental racism,” he writes. Fortunately, in 2012, activists got the town added to the National Register of Historic Places, beginning a process of cleanup and preservation. Tabor’s detailed history is a good complement to Ben Raines’ The Last Slave Ship.

A sharp portrait of a unique American town that stands as “a stark symbol of self-determination.”