Alabama shipwreck holds key for kin of enslaved Africans

MOBILE, Ala. — Keys to the past and the future of a community descended from enslaved Africans lie in a river bottom on Alabama’s Gulf Coast, where the remains of the last known U.S. slave ship rest a few miles from what’s left of the village built by the newly freed people after the Civil War.

Work performed this month will help answer a question residents of the area called Africatown USA are anxious to resolve: Can remnants of the slave ship Clotilda be retrieved from the water to both fill out details about their heritage and to serve as an attraction that might revitalize the place their ancestors built after emancipation?

A crew hired by the Alabama Historical Commission, working over 10 days ending Thursday, took fallen trees off the submerged remains of the ship, scooped muck out of the hull and retrieved displaced pieces to see what’s left of the Clotilda, which is described as the most intact slave ship ever found. The work will help determine what, if anything, can be done with the wreckage in years ahead.

Some want a museum featuring the actual Clotilda, which was hired by a rich, white steamship captain on a bet to violate the U.S. ban on slave importation the year before the Confederacy was founded to preserve slavery and white supremacy in the South.

“The question is, give me a timetable. What’s the date for getting that boat out of that doggone water?” Africatown resident and activist Joe Womack asked team members during a public forum as work began. Nearby, a new “heritage house” that could display artifacts is under construction.

Others aren’t too concerned about the ship itself, which they view as only part of a larger story. The president of the Clotilda Descendants Association, Darron Patterson, said a few artifacts and a replica would be just fine for telling the tale of the 110 African captives and how their lives add to the narrative of slavery and the United States. “Once those people came out of that cargo hold and grew up into men and women, they produced Africatown,” said Patterson, whose great great grandfather, Pollee Allen, was among the captives. “And we, as the descendants, want to be sure that that legacy lives on.”

The Clotilda was the last ship known to transport African captives to the American South for enslavement.