Skip to main content
Your Page Title

Mississippi Edition - 8/17/22 - The Last Slave Ship

Email share
Comments
Traffic passes a mural of the slave ship Clotilda along Africatown Boulevard, in Mobile, Ala., May 30, 2019. Researchers are returning to the Alabama coast near Mobile in May 2022 to assess the sunken remains of the Clotilda, which was the last slave ship to bring captive Africans to the United States more than 160 years earlier.
AP Photo/Kevin McGill, File

Fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed, the Clotilda became the last ship to bring enslaved Africans to the United States. After its arrival in Mobile Bay in July 1860, the ship was burned and deliberately sunk to hide the crime and allow the wealthy perpetrators to escape prosecution.

After the Civil War the captives of the Clotilda founded the community Africatown north of Mobile.

And in 2018 - nearly 160 years later - journalist Ben Raines found the sunken wreck with the help researchers at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Raines has turned his own research and work into a book: "The Last Slave Ship." He tells us more about the ship, and the efforts to remember and revive Africatown.