Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America Book

In 1860, an American slave dealer won a bet that he could bring a shipload of people into Mobile despite British and Federal prohibitions on the slave trade, and he won--the Clotilda delivered several hundred West Africans into the south just as the Civil War sealed off the trade forever. Amazingly, most of the survivors were able to reunite after emancipation, and they secured a section of land in south Alabama where they and their descendants live today (the last original settler died in 1935). Because they were first generation Africans, still speaking their native languages and practicing Islam, they remained isolated from other African-Americans nearby and became largely self-sufficient on their isolated river bend. It is both good and sad that a new bridge has brought them into wider contact with the 21st century, especially for young people who have a reason to return home, but at the cost of the loss of their independence, surviving craft skills and carefully passed on oral history.