Descendant tells the story of the Clotilda - the last known ship to smuggle stolen Africans to America - the unthinkable cover-up, and the impact of that crime on generations of descendants living in Africatown. Once the past is revealed, can the future be reclaimed?
In this short film, the descendants of Africans on the last known American slave ship, Clotilda, describe what it would mean to discover and document the wreck site of the vessel.
What happens when the last known Africans brought to America illegally fight back—not with weapons, but with culture, memory, and land? This is the hidden story of Africatown, Alabama, a community founded by survivors of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to enter the United States. The ship was burned. The crime buried. The people silenced. For over a century. But they didn’t forget. In this cinematic deep dive, we uncover the deliberate erasure of Africatown.
After the Africatown community voted to annex to the City of Mobile in 1960, the city decided to build a public housing project in the Happy Hills section of Africatown to relieve overcrowding that existed in Plateau and Magazine Point. The Josephine Allen Housing Project was constructed and consisted of about 250 housing units for approximately 1,500 people. The housing project was shut down, and the last family was moved out in 2015.
Hog Bayou is the area north of Paper Mill Road that the slaves from the Clotilda used for hunting and fishing to help feed themselves. They decided not to build any houses in that area so as not to drive away the vast amount of wildlife there.

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (WSFA) - The numbers are in and Montgomery is seeing major growth when it come to tourism with travel expenditures near $1 billion. The Equal Justice Initiative’s Memorial and Museum is one of he big reasons so many people are visiting the Capital City. Since its opening in April of last year, it has brought 400,000 more visitors to Montgomery.

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.

The incredible true story of the last ship to carry enslaved people to America, the remarkable town its survivors founded after emancipation, and the complicated legacy their descendants carry with them to this day—by the journalist who discovered the ship’s remains.

A major literary event: a newly published work from the author of the American classic Their Eyes Were Watching God, with a foreword from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker, brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story....

Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

In the summer of 1860, more than fifty years after the United States legally abolished the international slave trade, 110 men, women, and children from Benin and Nigeria were brought ashore in Alabama under cover of night. They were the last recorded group of Africans deported to the United States as as slaves. Timothy Meaher, an established...

Debates on reparations for slavery have emerged on national and international levels. However, much of the discourse centers on the legitimate slave trade. Few people are cognizant of the fact that the transatlantic slave trade consisted of both a legal trade and an illegal trade that began after...

Discover all the historic sites of Africatown with a comprehensive guide available exclusively in print at the Africatown Heritage House.
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