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. (Feb.)

In 1860, the Clotilda landed on Alabama's Gulf Coast, illegally bringing the last group of enslaved people from Africa to the United States. After emancipation, they created their own Yoruba-speaking community, called Africatown, as chronicled in Zora Neale Hurston's Barracoon. Freelance journalist Tabor tells Africatown's story to this day, with the community struggling to survive even as discovery of the Clotilda's remains fires up a desire to a create a memorial to the community. With a 40,000-copy first printing.

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." Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.