After World War II, the neighborhood was absorbed by the city of Mobile. Some 100 descendants of the Clotilda enslaved people still live in Africatown, and others are around the country. Research published in 2020 indicated that another survivor, Matilda McCrear, lived until 1940. She was long thought to have been the last survivor of the Clotilda. She married, had a daughter, and lived to 1937 in Bogue Chitto. Redoshi, another captive on the Clotilda, was sold to a planter in Dallas County, Alabama, where she became known also as Sally Smith. They were joined by other continental Africans and formed a community that continued to practice many of their West African traditions and Yoruba language for decades.Ī spokesman for the community, Cudjo Lewis lived until 1935 and was one of the last survivors from the Clotilda. After the voyage, the ship was burned and scuttled in Mobile Bay in an attempt to destroy the evidence.Īfter the Civil War, Cudjo Kazoola Lewis and thirty-one other formerly enslaved people founded Africatown on the north side of Mobile, Alabama. In the case of the Clotilda, the voyage's sponsors were based in the South and planned to buy Africans in Whydah, Dahomey. involvement in the Atlantic slave trade had been banned by Congress through the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves enacted on Ma(effective January 1, 1808), but the practice continued illegally, especially through slave traders based in New York in the 1850s and early 1860.
The ship was a two-masted schooner, 86 feet (26 m) long with a beam of 23 ft (7.0 m). slave ship to bring captives from Africa to the United States, arriving at Mobile Bay, in autumn 1859 or July 9, 1860, with 110 kidnapped African men, women, and children. The schooner Clotilda (often misspelled Clotilde) was the last known U.S. Wreck of the slave ship, Clotilda, photograph from Historic Sketches of the South by Emma Langdon Roche, 1914