Africatown: America’s Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created

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. Agent: Jane Dystel, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret LLC. (Feb.)