MOBILE, Ala. — A museum telling the story of the Clotilda, the last ship known to transport Africans to the American South for enslavement, opened Saturday, exactly 163 years after the ship arrived in Alabama’s Mobile Bay.
Dedication ceremonies for the $1.3 million Africatown Heritage House and “Clotilda: The Exhibition” took place Friday and Saturday in Mobile. The exhibit tells about the ship, its survivors, and how they founded the community of Africatown in Mobile after being freed from five years of slavery after the Civil War.
The Clotildas left Alabama in 1860, more than 50 years after Congress banned the importation of additional enslaved people, on a clandestine trip financed by Timothy Meaher, whose descendants still own millions of dollars in land around Mobile .
The Clotilda illegally transported 110 captives from what is now the West African nation of Benin to Alabama. The captain, William Foster, moved women, men and children off the Clotilda once it reached Mobile and set fire to the ship to hide evidence of the voyage. Most of the Clotilda did not burn, and much of the ship is still in the Mobile River, which flows into Mobile Bay.
Clotilda’s remains were discovered in 2019 and Meaher’s descendants released a statement last year calling his actions 160 years ago “evil and unforgivable”.
The museum includes a brief history of the transatlantic slave trade and highlights the survivors of the 45-day journey from Africa, AL.com reported. It tells the story of its most famous passenger, Oluale Kossola, better known as Cudjoe Lewis. His interviews in the 1920s provided information about the Clotilda and her passengers to historians and scholars.
Other survivors of the ship are highlighted, including Matlida McCrear, who died in 1940 in Selma, Alabama, and was the last known survivor of the Clotilda. McCrear was separated from his mother at a young age and tried to escape from a slave owner when he was 3 years old. McCrear and her sister “fled into a swamp, hiding there for hours until the dogs sniffed them out,” according to a display at the museum.
“I think those who visit will really learn a lot about this particular story,” said Jeremy Ellis, president of the Clotilda Descendants Association and a sixth-generation descendant of Pollee and Rose Allen, who were enslaved and on the Clotilda. “It tells the story of West African culture, what the 110 experienced in the Middle Passage and the first five years of slavery and what they overcame in 1865 in the founding of Africatown.”
