By MICHAEL THOMASON
Special to the Press-Register
Mobilians take pride in remembering their history — sometimes inaccurately, perhaps, but at least we remember. Or do we?
This year is the sesquicentennial of a very important event in our history, and that of the nation. Yet there have been no re-enactments, symposia, parades or much of anything.
It is as if we have forgotten, or perhaps don’t want to remember, the event that took place 150 years ago.
In July 1860, a coasting schooner slipped quietly into the bayous along the Alabama-Mississippi state line. It was the Clotilda, and instead of timber or other ordinary trade goods that it usually carried, it had a cargo of some 110 Africans being brought illegally into the United States to be slaves.
The whole venture was a product of the audacity of Timothy Meaher, who had wagered that he could buy and transport Africans into the U.S. despite laws and the prohibition written into the Constitution.
Various versions of the story of the outfitting of the Clotilda, its voyage and the work of its captain, William Foster, have been told almost since the event occurred, often peppered with errors such as getting the date and the proper name of the ship wrong, but told nonetheless.
Most recently, Sylviane Diouff’s “Dreams of Africa in Alabama” (Oxford, 2007) tells the story accurately, but how many of us have read her book?
The last Africans brought to our country to be slaves arrived here just as the secession crisis was reaching a fever pitch.
While the local federal court was informed of the illegal arrival of the Clotilda and made attempts to discover what had happened, its feeble efforts to do so were drowned out in the march to secede from the Union, which Alabama did in January 1861.
The slave-trading case was dropped and the Africans were officially forgotten, serving their new masters as slaves until the war’s end in 1865.
In the years that followed, some of the Clotilda Africans settled in the area we know today as Africatown. While they hoped to return to West Africa, and asked people — including Mr. Meaher — to do this (he was most unsympathetic), they would live out their lives in their community located near the point where they had been brought ashore in 1860.
They survived, but it would be hard to say they prospered; and gradually the Africans died off and were buried in a cemetery near their settlement.
The last survivor and the most famous of all, Cudjo (or Kazoola) Lewis, died in 1935.
Off and on over the years, journalists and the occasional scholar visited and tried to tell the group’s story, none so well as Emma Langdon Roche, whose 1914 book, “Historic Sketches of the South,” is a remarkable account, still worth reading today.
An occasional festival has punctuated the years since the Africans were brought here, but few if any white people were involved. The story was largely ignored or forgotten by the larger community until recently, when an increase in scholarly research and an easing of racial attitudes have brought it back from near oblivion.
Perhaps now we will learn to remember and celebrate the survival of the last Africans brought here as slaves.
The Africatown story reminds us that history can be lost, forgotten or ignored, even in history-conscious Mobile. Many African-Americans’ contributions to our community’s racial progress over the past eight to 10 decades are in danger of being forgotten as their contemporaries die off.
Brave men such as civil rights leaders Wiley Bolden and John LeFlore are little more than vaguely remembered names today, even though the city has dedicated a beautiful park and sculpture to LeFlore and former Mobile Mayor Joe Langan.
From the people of Africatown who survived in a largely hostile land into which they had been brought against their will, to the leaders of the civil rights movement in Mobile who worked to tear down the color barrier despite great and hostile opposition, the list of such men and women is long.
They deserve to be celebrated for their commitment to equality and racial harmony.
They did not leave the region in search of better opportunities; they stayed here and helped transform Mobile.
Their legacy lies in the lessons about humanity they have left us. We can repay our debt to them by remembering who they were as well as what they did.
Michael Thomason is emeritus professor of history at the University of South Alabama. His e-mail address is email@example.com.