Africatown: The Last Slave Ship Survivors Who Built a Town

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[SPEAKER_00]: It's a hot summer night, in 1860, along the Mobile River Delta.

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[SPEAKER_00]: In the muddy water, a 19-year-old West African man presses himself against the reads, trying not to breathe too loudly.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Around him, dozens of others huddled in the dark swamp, exhausted and terrified

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[SPEAKER_00]: The smell of burning wood lingers from the ship they arrived on, a shunner just set a blaze and sunk to hide a crime.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Mosquitoes nip with their skin as the group waits in silence, hearts pounding.

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[SPEAKER_00]: They've survived an ordeal across the ocean, only to be smuggled ashore under night's cover.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Now they hide, ankle deep and mud, listening for the sounds of slave catchers.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The young man closes his eyes and pictures his home village across the sea.

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[SPEAKER_00]: He wanders if he'll ever see it again.

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[SPEAKER_00]: here in the Alabama night, far from the length of his birth, he grips a piece of charred wood in his fist, a small token of the ship that was his last link to Africa.

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[SPEAKER_00]: In this moment he makes a silent promise, if he can't return home, he will build a new

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[SPEAKER_00]: Hello friend.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back to hometown history.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The podcast that takes a stroll down the main streets and back alleys of the past to uncover how local stories shaped the world.

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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Shane Waters and today we're exploring a remarkable hometown story of courage and community.

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[SPEAKER_00]: We journey to Mobile, Alabama to discover the true story of Africa Town, a legacy of resilience.

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[SPEAKER_00]: In this episode, we'll uncover how a group of West Africans survivors of the last known slave ship to reach America, founded their own town on Alabama soil in the 1860s.

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[SPEAKER_00]: will relive the harrowing illegal voyage of the Clotilda.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Follow these men and women as they struggle for freedom and unity after emancipation.

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[SPEAKER_00]: See their community grow against all odds to the early 20th century and meet the descendants preserving their legacy today.

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[SPEAKER_00]: but to understand Africa Town's resilience, we need to go back to 1860.

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[SPEAKER_00]: To a wager, a war, and a ship, named Clotilda.

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[SPEAKER_00]: By the late 1850s, the transatlantic slave trade was officially banned.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The U.S. had an outlawed importing enslaved Africans in 1808, and Congress even made it piracy, punishable by death in 1820.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Yet on the eve of the Civil War, the American South's appetite for slave labor was still insatiable.

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[SPEAKER_00]: in West Africa, the kingdom of Dahome was fueling this demand by raiding neighboring peoples and selling captives to traders.

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[SPEAKER_00]: It was a brutal business.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Dahome's army, including its fierce women warriors, would attack villages at dawn, killing those who resisted and capturing the young.

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[SPEAKER_00]: One American cotton broker in Mobile, Timothy Meher, had a wicked idea.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Legend has it, he bragged he could smuggle a shipload of Africans into Alabama without being hanged.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Essentially making a bet that he could defy the law and get away with it.

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[SPEAKER_00]: In July, 1860, me her finance to the shunner, Hotel Da, under Captain William Foster, to make a secret voyage to West Africa.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The crew sailed to the port of Weeda on the bite of benign.

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[SPEAKER_00]: there, Captain Foster, bought 110 captives from De Helmys agents, men, women and children, between 5 and 23 years old.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Most were from the Europe of people, and other nearby ethnic groups, torn from villages into days, banean, and Nigeria,

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[SPEAKER_00]: They were marched in chains to a coastal holding pen to await the dangerous journey ahead.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Under the cover of darkness, in mid July, 1860, the clotilda slipped out to sea with its human cargo.

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[SPEAKER_00]: This would be the last known slave ship to bring captives to American shores.

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[SPEAKER_00]: cramped in the hold, the kidnapped Africans endured a torturous at length of crossing of roughly 60 to 70 days.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Many had never seen the ocean before.

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[SPEAKER_00]: They suffered in darkness, thirst, and fear, as the ship pitched in storms.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Despite the danger of capture by naval patrols, the Clotilda reached the Alabama coast by late July, 1860.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Captain Foster sneaked into Mobile Bay at night and spirited the 110 captives upriver, passed the authorities.

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[SPEAKER_00]: to erase the evidence of their crime, foster ordered the Clotilda burned, and sunk in the mobile river, near an area called 12 Mile Island.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The captives all illegally enslaved were hurriedly distributed to various buyers.

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[SPEAKER_00]: About 32 people went to Timothy Mayher himself, who had arranged the venture and his brothers.

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[SPEAKER_00]: somewhere sold off to plantations, further inland.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Among those given, to Mayher's brother, James, was a young man named Oluile Kosala, later known in America as Kujo Lewis, who would become one of Africa towns key founders.

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[SPEAKER_00]: For the next five years, these Africans lived in slavery on Alabama soil.

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[SPEAKER_00]: They had arrived on the eve of the Civil War, which broke out in 1861.

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[SPEAKER_00]: I salated in a foreign land.

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[SPEAKER_00]: They labored mostly on plantations and in shipyards around Mobile.

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[SPEAKER_00]: They couldn't speak English, and were mocked by local American born slaves, who saw

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[SPEAKER_00]: some called them savages and even compared them to monkeys.

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[SPEAKER_00]: But the Africans remained a tight knit group, clinging to their own language and memories.

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[SPEAKER_00]: They would whisper together in Europe and other tongues by night, keeping their heritage alive and secret.

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[SPEAKER_00]: On one plantation, when an overseer tried to whip an African woman, she and her country women fought back fiercely, grabbing the whip and lashing him with it instead until he fled.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Despite the brutal reality of slavery, these captives from Clotilda refused to surrender their dignity.

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[SPEAKER_00]: In 1865, the Civil War ended, and with it slavery in the United States, Union forces occupied Mobile, that spring.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And at last, the Clotilda Africans learned they were free.

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[SPEAKER_00]: For Kujo and his shipmates, Joy and Relief flooded in.

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[SPEAKER_00]: that night the newly freed group celebrated, in the only way they knew how.

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[SPEAKER_00]: They made drums from whatever they could find, and danced, singing the songs of home under the open sky.

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[SPEAKER_00]: After five years of bondage, they were free at last, but freedom brought a new crisis.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Where could they go now?

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[SPEAKER_00]: Imagine their position, strangers in a strange land, thousands of miles from home, suddenly cast a drift with nothing.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Their first longing was not to remain in America, but to go back to Africa.

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[SPEAKER_00]: In those early days of freedom, the clotilda survivors huddled together and made a plan.

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[SPEAKER_00]: They would work for wages, save every penny, and somehow find passage across the ocean back to their families.

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[SPEAKER_00]: They even asked the women among them to forego any fine dresses or comforts.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Every member of the community vowed to save all they could for the dream of returning home.

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[SPEAKER_00]: For a time, they truly believed they might see Africa again.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The freed men took whatever jobs they could around mobile, cutting timber, working in mills, selling vegetables, and saved up their meager wages.

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[SPEAKER_00]: They appealed to anyone who might help.

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[SPEAKER_00]: In 1870, they formally asked the American Colonization Society, an organization that had sent willing-blank Americans to Liberia for passage to West Africa,

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[SPEAKER_00]: But their plea was denied.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The cost of chartering a ship was simply far beyond their reach.

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[SPEAKER_00]: It slowly dawned on the group that it would cost too much to go home.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Africa was out of reach.

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[SPEAKER_00]: This realization was heartbreaking.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Many wept with longing for the families in homeland they would likely never see again.

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[SPEAKER_00]: get in this moment of despair a new resolve took root, if they couldn't return to Africa, they would bring Africa to Alabama.

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[SPEAKER_00]: They would form their own self-sufficient community, living by the values and traditions they carried from their motherland.

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[SPEAKER_00]: But to do that, they needed land.

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[SPEAKER_00]: In early 1866, a delegation of the freed, Clotilde Group decided to ask the man who caused their plight in the first place, Timothy Mayer, to grant them a parcel of his property.

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[SPEAKER_00]: They felt quite justifiably that may hear owed them

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[SPEAKER_00]: After all, he had a legally enslaved them, profited from their labor, and torn them from their homes.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Now they were free, and they had nothing.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Surely, he could spare some unused land, along the Delta, where they could build modest lives.

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[SPEAKER_00]: they chose Kujo Lewis to speak on behalf of the group.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Kujo was young, but respected, and he could communicate their request in English.

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[SPEAKER_00]: One day, as the story goes, Kujo was chopping wood when Captain Tim may hear himself walked by.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Kujo gathered his courage and stopped working to address him.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Timothy may her stood up and surprise his face hardening.

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[SPEAKER_00]: He never intended to support these people beyond the bare minimum.

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[SPEAKER_00]: His heartless refusal was a bitter disappointment.

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[SPEAKER_00]: If he thought his words would crush the Africans resolve, he was mistaken.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Kujo returned to the community and reported Mayher's answer

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[SPEAKER_00]: The Clotilda survivors, about 30 men and women at this point in the Mobile area, did not give up on their dream.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Working even harder than before, the men took jobs in steamboat docks and saw mills, and the women sold produce and handmade goods in mobiles markets.

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[SPEAKER_00]: They lived incredibly furgally, cornmeal and molasses were staple meals, pinching pennies to pool their savings.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Within a few years, remarkably, they gathered enough money to purchase land on the outskirts of Mobile.

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[SPEAKER_00]: In 1866, just one year after emancipation, the group established their own settlement, which

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[SPEAKER_00]: It would become one of the first towns in the United States, found it in controlled entirely by black people, and uniquely by Africans who had been born free across the ocean.

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[SPEAKER_00]: They bought two main tracks of land.

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[SPEAKER_00]: One was approximately a 50-acre area on a plateau north of Mobile, it became the heart of African town.

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[SPEAKER_00]: A smaller, seven-acre parcel, a couple miles away, became known as Louis-Cortars after Koo-Jose shipmate Charlie Lewis, who helped establish it.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The land came from none other than the May hear family, who charged them full prize.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Nevertheless, by paying with their own hard-earned dollars, the community had achieved

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[SPEAKER_00]: What these determined mid-and-women created an African town was astounding.

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[SPEAKER_00]: They were thousands of miles from Africa, yet they organized their village, following African customs as much as possible.

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[SPEAKER_00]: They appointed a chief, a man named Gumpa, who was actually of DeHomian Royal lineage.

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[SPEAKER_00]: He was a relative of the African king that sold them.

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[SPEAKER_00]: They did not hold a grudge against Gumpa.

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[SPEAKER_00]: He had been enslaved alongside them, and they respected his noble background.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Gumpa also called African Peter by locals, became the settlement unofficial leader, or king, guiding the community just as a chief wood back in West Africa.

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[SPEAKER_00]: They also set up a Council of Elders in Judges to keep order, adapting the laws of their homelands to their new situation.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Two men, Jabba and Kibi, both fellow Africans, served as judges who mediated disputes.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Minor offenses like theft or public drunkenness were handled internally.

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[SPEAKER_00]: A fenders had to come before the judges.

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[SPEAKER_00]: In essence, they established a legal system, based on their own values, separated from the hostile laws of reconstruction Alabama.

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[SPEAKER_00]: crucially, the people of African town maintained their language and culture.

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[SPEAKER_00]: In the early years, they spoke Yoruba and other African languages among themselves.

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[SPEAKER_00]: They gave their children dual names, one in their African town and one in English for dealing with Americans.

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[SPEAKER_00]: This way the children would never forget their heritage, even as they grew up in Alabama.

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[SPEAKER_00]: that doesn't mean life in African town was idyllic or free from outside interference.

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[SPEAKER_00]: White neighbors from Mobile were not amused, and sometimes hostile toward this experiment and black autonomy at their doorstep.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The African founders also faced prejudice from some black Americans in the area who viewed the Africans as foreigners

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[SPEAKER_00]: The children of African town were taunted with slurs by other black kids who had absorbed racial notions from the wider society.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Despite tensions, African town thrived as a unique town.

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[SPEAKER_00]: By the 1870s, the community had begun to blend old and new traditions.

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[SPEAKER_00]: many members while holding onto African spiritual practices, started converting to Christianity under the influence of nearby churches.

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[SPEAKER_00]: In 1872, they built their own Baptist Church, known as the old landmark church, so they could worship together in their community.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Sunday services were a mix of the familiar and the new.

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[SPEAKER_00]: They sang Christian hymns, and also sometimes prayers were murmured in Europe.

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[SPEAKER_00]: They established a graveyard in 1876 on their land, ensuring their loved ones could be laid to rest with dignity on the soil they owned.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Education was another priority.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The formerly enslaved Africans understood that knowledge was key to their children's future in America.

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[SPEAKER_00]: They didn't wait for white authorities to offer help.

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[SPEAKER_00]: They built a school themselves, a humble one-room school house, and then petitioned the county for a teacher for their kids.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Indeed, the children of Africa town grew up hearing both English and Yoruba, learning the value of hard work from parents who had literally built their world from nothing.

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[SPEAKER_00]: By the 1880s a second generation was coming of age in Africa town, young Americans who had never seen Africa, yet were raised with vivid stories of the soil of their ancestors.

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[SPEAKER_00]: or histories we call that even into the early 20th centuries.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Elders and Africa Town could be heard conversing in Europe on their front porches.

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[SPEAKER_00]: As pecan trees, descendants of those the Africans planted swayed overhead.

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[SPEAKER_00]: for a time, Africa town, or African town as it was called then, remained to themselves.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The original survivors of the Clotilda kept close ties, referring to one another as shipmates, or African brothers and sisters.

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[SPEAKER_00]: They largely married within their group, or with members of the local black community who accepted them.

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[SPEAKER_00]: But the community's population in the late 1800s was small, perhaps a few dozen families, but it was tight knit and self-governing.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The reconstruction era between 1865 and 1877, and the subsequent rise of Jim Crow, brought their own challenges.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Africa towns' residents were not spared the oppression that southern black people faced

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[SPEAKER_00]: Some of the men were even conscripted by the Confederates in the waning days of the Civil War.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Force to labor on fortifications and later a few exercise newfound rights by voting in the 1870s elections.

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[SPEAKER_00]: One African town woman joined the freed men's bank and a national ex-slave mutual aid society that advocated for reparations.

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[SPEAKER_00]: a remarkable early activism for the rights of formerly enslaved people.

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[SPEAKER_00]: With the post-war South was dangerous, racial violence was rampant.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Nearby, lynchens occurred in 1906 and 1907, terrorizing black communities around Mobile.

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[SPEAKER_00]: It's a testament to Africa towns resolve that the community endured through these threats, holding together even as so many forces tried to pull black Americans down.

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[SPEAKER_00]: by 1900, Africa Town had grown.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The surrounding areas of plateau and magazine point, once rural outskirts, became populated by more black families, many drawn by jobs and local industries.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Still, African Town maintained its distinct identity.

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[SPEAKER_00]: the city of Mobile, perhaps resentful or simply neglectful, refuse to annex the settlement for decades.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Denying it basic services like paved roads and sewer lines, until well into the 20th century.

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[SPEAKER_00]: So the people managed largely on their own, they formed gardens, fished the

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[SPEAKER_00]: In 1910, a proper school, Mobile County Training School, was founded in the area by a Black Educator, with influence from Booker T. Washington's philosophy.

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[SPEAKER_00]: This school later funded in part by Northern Fling of the Pest, Julius Rosemald, became a pillar of the community.

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[SPEAKER_00]: and educated generations of African town children, including the famed writer, Albert Murray, who graduated in 1935.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Amid these developments, the original pioneers of African town grew old.

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[SPEAKER_00]: by the 1910s, most of the men and women who have been brought on Clotilda were passing away.

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[SPEAKER_00]: One by one, the voices that spoke with an African accent fell silent.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The last survivor, living in Africa town, a woman named Matilda, died in 1912.

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[SPEAKER_00]: A few others who have moved elsewhere died in the years after.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Finally, in 1935, Kujo Lewis passed away at age 94.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The very last known survivor of the transatlantic slave trade in the United States.

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[SPEAKER_00]: He had lived to see his small community transform over 70 years.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Shortly before his death, Kujo was often found sitting by the old Africa Town Cemetery, where many of his fellow survivors were buried, including his beloved wife, Abel.

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[SPEAKER_00]: In his final years, he endured unspeakable personal losses

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[SPEAKER_00]: Abel died around 1908, and all six of their children passed away young, three from illnesses and accidents, and his last son tragically died in the 1920s, after being ensnared in a notorious convict leasing camp, a harsh system that was slavery and all but name.

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[SPEAKER_00]: By the time authors Zorin Neal Hurston came to interview him in 1927,

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[SPEAKER_00]: Kujo lived alone in a small frame house, the oldest man in Africa town, tending a garden in telling stories to anyone who would listen.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Herstin's resulting book, Barakun, captured Kujo's voice and memories, in dialect just as he spoke, ensuring that future generations would hear his story firsthand.

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[SPEAKER_00]: To herstin and other visitors, Kujo recounted not only the pain of captivity, the pride of Africa town, how he and his people built a life on their own terms.

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[SPEAKER_00]: He described their self-governance, their resistance to mistreatment, and the way they came together as a community.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks to such accounts, the legacy of the Clotilda survivors were preserved in print, even as the people themselves left this world.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Africa Town itself lived on.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Over the decades, it slowly transformed from a small isolated village into a more integrated neighborhood of Mobile.

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[SPEAKER_00]: In the 1940s and 50s, the city finally annexed Africa town, extended modern utilities to it.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Large industries, notably paper mills and factories, spring up around the area, bringing jobs

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[SPEAKER_00]: The skies sometimes rain to ash from the mills, and local waterways turned oily.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The environmental toll was significant.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The ones secluded hamlet transformed in what looked more like an industrial zone.

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[SPEAKER_00]: many descendants of the original families moved away over time, seeking opportunities elsewhere.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Especially a segregation laws eased, an integration opened new neighborhoods to black residents.

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[SPEAKER_00]: By the mid-20th century, Africa town's story, wrist being forgotten, dismissed by some as a local legend or a myth.

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[SPEAKER_00]: yet not everyone forgot.

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[SPEAKER_00]: In the 1950s, a local welder named Henry Williams, himself a descendant of Africa town, began campaigning to preserve the community's heritage.

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[SPEAKER_00]: He's the one who pushed to officially revive the name Africa town, combining the words and envisioned a heritage site that would honor the settlers

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[SPEAKER_00]: In the 1980s, Africa Town held folk festivals, celebrating its unique history, even attracting African diplomats and notable black celebrities to mobile.

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[SPEAKER_00]: these efforts, ebbed and flowed, facing challenges, including a highway project that bulldozed some historic African town homes.

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[SPEAKER_00]: But the flame of remembrance never died out completely.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The descendants kept telling their children the stories of a ship and the night of proud Africans who survived slavery and built a town.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Of ancestors who could still recall their

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[SPEAKER_00]: this oral history persisted, waiting for the wider world to listen.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Today, Africa Town still stands, a small residential community north of Mobile, dotted with modest homes, a few churches and oak-lined streets, a green sign of the entrance proudly reads, Africa Town, listing its historic sections, plateau, magazine, happy hills,

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[SPEAKER_00]: This place remains a living testament to the perseverance of its founders.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The law cabins built by the original settlers are gone now, replaced by modern houses.

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[SPEAKER_00]: But some of the very trees and bushes they planted still grow here.

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[SPEAKER_00]: In the cemetery where Kujo and others rest still exists.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The story of Africa Town is a reminder of the human capacity for hope and rebuilding.

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[SPEAKER_00]: These men and women endured one of the most horrific chapters imaginable, from the terror of a de homey raid, to the hellish middle passage, to enslavement in a foreign land.

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[SPEAKER_00]: They lost everything, yet they did not lose themselves.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Instead, they recreated a piece of home from memory, using nothing but their determination, faith, and solidarity.

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[SPEAKER_00]: In a sense, Africa Town was an act of resistance, resistance against their culture, being erased, and living in despair.

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[SPEAKER_00]: and that legacy of resistance carries on.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Every time a descendant tells the story of Kujul Huis, or a child in Mobile, learns about Africa Town in school, or a tourist reads the historical marker by the old church, the spirit of Africa Town in Doors.

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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Shane Waters, every home town has a story, and Africa towns is a story of survival and hope, rising in the ashes of injustice.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Tonight we've seen how a handful of determined people built a new life on old soil, turning tragedy into triumph, good night.