Africatown: America’s Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created by Nick Tabor (review)

Reviewed by: Africatown: America's Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created by Nick Tabor Elizabeth D. Blum Africatown: America's Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created. By Nick Tabor. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2023. Pp. xii, 372. 29. 99, ISBN 978-1-250-76654-0. ) In Africatown: America's Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created, journalist Nick Tabor weaves a compelling tale of intergenerational trauma in the story of the last group of people forcibly brought from Africa to America and into enslavement shortly before the Civil War. Some may be familiar with elements of Africatown's story from the recent publicity surrounding the 2018 discovery in Mobile Bay of the wreck of the Clotilda. Tabor reconstructs the story. He begins with the Clotilda's eventual captives' lives in the area of modern Nigeria, Benin, and Togo. Tabor centers the story particularly on one of the shipmates, known as Kossola and later as Cudjo Lewis, who was captured as a young man in a raid led by the king of Dahomey around 1860. Undeterred by the illegality of importing slaves, Tim Meaher of Mobile, Alabama, constructed a state-of-the-art slave ship, employing William Foster as its captain. After an arduous journey, the Clotilda picked up its cargo of approximately 110 people, including Kossola, and returned to the United End Page 443 States. Tabor then follows the enslaved shipmates and their descendants, who formed the Africatown community, through the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as they survived decades of racism and discrimination. Tabor has a striking point to make: these shipmates, brought to America at the beginning of a civil war, faced strife and opposition from every side, including other African Americans. Local enslaved people referred to them as "savages" and jeered at the shipmates for their different speech and appearance (p. 80). Discussing the 1920s and 1930s, Tabor details the behind-the-scenes scheming of Harlem Renaissance literati Zora Neale Hurston, her patron Charlotte Osgood Mason, and Alain Locke as they actively worked to keep Cudjo from speaking to other researchers. Hurston and Mason quickly lost interest in the story, but even elite African Americans felt they owned the story of Africatown's residents, controlling their voices. Africatown residents fought racism and hardship through developing their community. After the Civil War, unable to save the funds required to return home, the shipmates shifted their vision to "a kind of replica of their home-towns. . . a place where they could speak Yoruba, cook familiar foods, raise children, and appoint a council of elders" (p. 90). Gradually, they purchased small plots of land, built a church and a school, and later ran local businesses. As the shipmates' children grew up, they also dealt with an onslaught from local industry. The Meahers had a lumber mill in the area in the mid-1800s, and other industries followed in quick succession, bringing some jobs but more pollution and health hazards to the desperately poor area. Brick-making and railroad work, and later paper mills, meat processing plants, and oil storage and refineries, packed the area around Africatown. Environmental racism emerged as a persistent theme as the residents suffered from high rates of cancer. In addition, deep structural inequalities added to the problem. After World War II, Mobile enlarged highways and bridges at the expense of Africatown and its residents. As the twentieth century wore into the twenty-first, the shipmates' descendants fought to keep their community intact through historical designations and local activism. Skillfully weaving context and background into his narrative, Tabor perfectly encapsulates the concept of systemic racism through his story of the Clotilda shipmates and their descendants. Tabor's writing is both engaging and accessible as he moves deftly through more than 150 years of the story. Overall, this book would serve as a compelling source for scholars and undergraduates in a wide range of subjects, including ones centering on race, enslavement, the environment, and urbanization. Elizabeth D. Blum Troy University Copyright © 2024 The Southern Historical Association