I heard of the ship the Clotilda only a month or so ago on “Finding Your Roots.” It’s the last known ship to bring slaves in to the US in 1860. Apparently there was a bet where someone said they could still bring in new slaves even though it was illegal and had been for 50+ years.
Seems the ship might have been found recently, burned and sunk near Mobile, AL. Here’s the news article.
What an amazing, sobering find, and what a detailed article. I’m only about a quarter of the way through, but thank you for posting it.
I found it interesting too. And since I had never heard of it until recently it was odd it came up being found. Those men knew what they were doing was wrong, so wrong they burned the damned ship.
I looked it up, and the Finding Your Roots show was about Questlove. I really like that show as well as they do a lot of ‘lost’ history.
I heard this story just yesterday on NPR. I guess a reporter actually found it during an exceptionally low tide.
Check out Dreams of Africa in Alabama, by Sylviane Diouf, for the story of the African survivors’ lives. There’s also a forthcoming book, Barracoon, of Zora Neale Hurston’s interviews with the last of them, in 1931!