Its modern history involves shuttered factories, a legacy of pollution from heavy industry and the construction of a major highway through the heart of town that destroyed hundreds of homes and split the community in two.ĭuring the 20 years I spent covering the environment for the Mobile Press-Register, I sometimes wrote stories about problems in Africatown. Fewer than 2,000 people live in neighborhoods dotted with vacant lots, ramshackle houses and potholed streets. All the businesses and most of the people are gone.
HAND OF FATE SUNKEN TREASURE MOVIE
By the 1950s, there were movie theaters, grocery stores, barbershops, restaurants and 12,000 residents. Washington, Zora Neale Hurston and others. By the early 1900s, Africatown was the fourth largest community founded by African Americans in the nation, attracting the attention of Booker T. The original name was African Town, because the founders, who had only been in America for five years at Emancipation, ruled it according to the laws and customs of their homeland. The town was founded after the Civil War by Clotilda survivors on land they bought from the plantation owner who had enslaved them. Remarkably, the descendants of those smuggled slaves still live in Africatown, a community on the edge of a swamp north of Mobile, about five miles from the island where I located the shipwreck. Out of 20,000 ships used in the global slave trade, just 13 have been found, and Clotilda is the only ship ever found that brought slaves to America.
The discovery was revealed more than a year after I found the ship, but that’s how long it took a team of archaeologists to confirm the find after an exhaustive analysis. The timing made for a perfect bookend to America’s history as a slaving nation, closing the loop between the arrival of the first slaves in Port Comfort, Virginia, in 1619 and the arrival of the last slaves brought to these shores aboard Clotilda in 1860. The ship’s discovery was announced in May, just a few months before the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first slaves brought to this country.
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