The Last Slave Ship Survivor - Interviewed in the 1930's

[JustAnotherGen]

https://www.history.com/news/zora-neale-hurston-barracoon-slave-clotilda-survivor

Roughly 60 years after the abolition of slavery, anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston made an incredible connection: She located the last surviving captive of the last slave ship to bring Africans to the United States.

How they did it - broke the law:

To avoid detection, Lewis’ captors snuck him and the other survivors into Alabama at night and made them hide in a swamp for several days. To hide the evidence of their crime, the 86-foot sailboat was then set ablaze on the banks of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta (its remains may have been uncovered in January 2018).

Lewis also describes what it was like to arrive on a plantation where no one spoke his language, and could explain to him where he was or what was going on. “We doan know why we be bring ’way from our country to work lak dis,” he told Hurston. “Everybody lookee at us strange. We want to talk wid de udder colored folkses but dey doan know whut we say.”

Some fake Academic "but what about-er" will probably read this on History.com and start whining - That's not fair. We need a White Town!

Lewis expected to receive compensation for being kidnapped and forced into slavery, and was angry to discover that emancipation didn’t come with the promise of “forty acres and a mule,” or any other kind of reparations. Frustrated by the refusal of the government to provide him with land to live on after stealing him away from his homeland, he and a group of 31 other freepeople saved up money to buy land near the state capital of Mobile, which they called Africatown.

Mr. Lewis:


A marker for Mr. Lewis

[ehrnst]

1. Off to the greatest page with you! (nt)

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. More detail......

The slave ship that brought Cujo and the others was called The Clotilde ...tho some say the name was mis-spelled and was actually the Clotilda.
Slaves were kidnapped from Ghana, and from there taken to Benin, to be sold, then were put on the Clothilda.
many sources say this ship was also burned after use.

Africa town is now part of a town called Pritchard, about 3 miles north of Mobile.

Another good book on the subject is

Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America

by Sylviane A. Diouf .

[JustAnotherGen]

6. Great dixiegrrrrl

Thanks you!

[Hoyt]

3. Still gasp for breath every time I think of Howard Zinn's description of slaves being "packed"

in little cages on the ships.

" . . . . . . they were packed aboard the slave ships, chained together in the dark, in spaces not much bigger than coffins. Some died for lack of air in the crowded, dirty cargo holds of the ships. Others jumped overboard to end their suffering. As many as a third of all the Africans shipped overseas may have died during the journey. But the trade was profitable , so merchants crammed the blacks into the holds of the slave ships like fish.

At first, the Dutch were the main slave traders. Later the English led the trade. Some Americans in New England entered the business, too. In 1637 the first American slave ship sailed from Massachusetts. Its holds were divided into racks two feet wide and six feet long, with leg irons to hold the captives in place. By 1800, somewhere between 10 million and 15 million black Africans had been brought to the Americas. In all, Africa may have lost as many as 50 million human beings to death and slavery during the centuries that we call the beginnings of modern civilization. . . . . ."


Hurston's book should be very interesting, although so sad.

[JustAnotherGen]

7. I've only been able to watch

the movie Amistad twice. Never again. It's up there with Schindler's list for me.

Excellent movies - but I can't take the mother going overboard with her tiny baby in Amistad - or the little kids hiding in the sewer in Schindler's list.

[annabanana]

4. Should be in EVERY History book in America!. . . . n/t

[brer cat]

5. Real history, real truth.

K&R

[sheshe2]

8. K&R

That picture of Mr. Lewis, powerful.

[panader0]

9. What a face--wow.

[BumRushDaShow]

10. "Dahomey" (Benin)

Well this just connected some dots for me because I remember the country's name but wasn't sure when it changed to "Benin" (it was 1975, right during my freshman year in high school). Of course learning European history in school was considered more important.

In any case, what is significant about this man's origins is how it represented the poster child of the pillaging of an African country - both its people and its practices of religion and art (culture). And moreso because that "last ship" (that was documented, but may not have been the "last" for all we know), sailed some 50 years after the trade was purportedly forbidden by law.

And it is no wonder why the country served as a template for "Wakanda" in the Black Panther film.

As a sidenote when researching some of this, apparently the artist QuestLove from the group The Roots, had an ancestor also on that "last ship" and he was on Henry Louis Gates' PBS series "Finding Your Roots" this past December -

(can't exactly point to a time mark because the 3 being featured had their stories pieced together and interspersed through the entire episode).

[kwassa]

15. I saw this. Gates had a picture of Questlove's ancestor ....

who had been enslaved in Africa. Questlove was blown away.

[Skinner]

11. This is in a new book. They were discussing it on NPR "1A" earlier this week

Barracoon
The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"
by Zora Neale Hurston

https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062748201/barracoon

[JustAnotherGen]

12. Thanks for posting that Skinner

That's exactly how I heard of this man. . . Waiting for my book to arrive!

[Behind the Aegis]

13. I posted this in Editorials last week.

It didn't get too many responses, but here it is (same story) ... link.

This is an important part of history which is getting white-washed, no pun intended. Unlike recent horrific events of a massive scale, there simply aren't the same first-person narratives when it comes to slavery, at least not in volume and not in this type of media format.

[lunamagica]

14. K&R for visibility.