A museum that tells the story of the Clotilda, the last known ship to transport Africans to the southern United States for slavery, opened on Saturday, exactly 163 years after the ship arrived in Mobile Bay , Alabama.
Groundbreaking ceremonies for the $1.3 million Africatown Heritage House and “Clotilda: The Exhibit” were held Friday and Saturday in the Municipality of Mobile. The exhibit tells the story of the ship, its survivors, and how they founded the community of Africatown, Mobile, after being freed from five years of slavery following the Civil War.
The Clotilda left Alabama in 1860, more than 50 years after Congress banned the importation of additional slaves, on a clandestine voyage funded by Timothy Meaher, whose descendants still own land worth millions of dollars. dollars around Mobile.
The Clotilda illegally transported 110 captive people from what is now the West African nation of Benin to Alabama. The captain, William Foster, transferred women, men and children off the Clotilda, once they reached Mobile, and set the ship on fire to conceal evidence of the voyage. Most of the Clotilda did not burn, and much of the ship is still in the Mobile River, which empties into Mobile Bay.
Remains of the Clotilda were discovered in 2019 and descendants of Timothy Meaher released a statement last year calling his actions 160 years ago “wicked and unforgivable”.
The museum includes a brief history of the transatlantic slave trade and highlights survivors of the 45-day journey from Africa, news site AL.com reported. It tells the story of its most famous passenger, Oluale Kossola, better known as Cudjoe Lewis. His interviews in the 1920s have provided information about the Clotilda and its passengers to historians and scholars.
Other survivors from the ship are featured in the exhibit, including Matlida McCrear, who died in 1940 in Selma, Alabama, who was the last known survivor of the Clotilda. Ms McCrear was separated from her mother at a young age and tried to escape from a slave owner when she was three years old. Matlida McCrear and her sister “ran away into a swamp, hiding there for hours until the dogs sniffed them out,” according to the museum.
“I think those who visit will learn a lot about this particular story,” said Jeremy Ellis, president of the Association of Descendants of the Clotilda, and sixth-generation descendant of Pollee and Rose Allen, who were enslaved on the Clotilda.
“It tells the story of West African culture, what the 110 (people) experienced in the Middle Passage, as well as the first five years of slavery and what they overcame in 1865 when founding Africatown,” Mr. Ellis said.
2023-07-09 18:32:12
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