Africatown: The Last Slave Ship To America and The Community It Created

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Exclusions apply. This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. To search for the American Stories podcast, go to the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On July 17th, 1935, a man named Cudjoe Lewis died in Mobile, Alabama at the age of 95. His death would further dwindle the number of remaining survivors of the Atlantic slave trade. He had lived the majority of his life in a small part of Mobile called Africa Town, a community that he and his former shipmates as they were called built from scratch. But our story doesn't start there. It starts at the assignment desk of journalist Nick Tabor, who was asked to track down and do a story on the descendants of those who lived in Africa Town.

After some searching, he found a man named Gary and gave him a call. Let's get into the story. The first thing he said to me on the phone was you don't need to be writing about the descendants. You should be writing about the neighborhood.

He was quite forceful about this. Gary's comment was it used to be this thriving community. He said when I grew up there in the 50s and 60s, there were good jobs. Everybody had big families. There was this thriving business district. It was just a wonderful place to grow up. He said now it looks like a war zone.

Tons of people have left. They built a highway through the neighborhood, wiped out the business district, and it's surrounded by heavy industry now. And he said, I want to know how it got to be that way. And I felt like it was an important question to investigate. So I went there on a day when this law firm was interviewing lots of people at a church about their family histories with cancer. Pollution emitted by this paper mill had caused hundreds of cancer cases in the neighborhood. I interviewed a whole bunch of people who all had these horrific stories. Everybody I ran into on the street, if I asked them about it, they would say my sisters died of cancer in their 40s. Both of my parents died of cancer.

I survived cancer twice myself. So when I went back to New York City, I found myself thinking about the neighborhood all the time. And that question that Gary had posed, how did it get to be this way, kept recurring to me.

And I kept thinking, I wish I could just move down there and piece together all every part of this story. What did they do to it? How did it get to be this way? And to ask what's the link between the slave ship and the pollution? Because we know it's not a coincidence that this community founded by the people who were on the last slave ship ended up being designated sort of this industrial dumping ground for southern Alabama out of all the possible places. It could not have been a coincidence that they chose Africa town. I thought, well, we could say it's racism, but that wouldn't really explain anything or reveal anything. But I thought that if we could understand how it had actually unfolded decade by decade, then it would reveal a lot.

So maybe six months later, I found myself packing up my apartment in New York and moved down to Alabama. We don't know very much about Cudjoe's early life. We know that he was from an area called Yoruba Land, an enormous section of West Africa. This might seem anachronistic, but I think in some ways we could say that it was a pretty democratic society. There's this paradox where the king was regarded as a god.

It was this extremely lofty position. The people could never see the king eating or drinking. Nobody could call the king by his personal name.

The king couldn't visit people's private homes and for the most part couldn't even be seen in the streets. But at the same time, the king's authority to some extent was symbolic and there were even carnival days or festival days where people would parade through the streets and voice criticisms of their leaders. The people for the most part spoke a common language. There was a pantheon of gods that everybody recognized, if not exactly worshipped. This society did a big business in palm oil in all sorts of European countries. They used it to make soap and candles. We know that he was from like a medium-sized town.

He started learning to be a warrior at a young age, but the chief of his town always said that people were only being trained in in warfare so that they could defend their town, not so that they could make war. To the south of Yoruba land was a nation called the Kingdom of Dahomey. It was a militarized nation from its inception. It generated its revenue by enslaving people from other parts of West Africa and selling them to European traders.

It had access to the coast. It controlled this city called Wida. Their king as of 1859, 1860, was named Glalie and in the early years of his reign, he was trafficking slaves in enormous numbers. Slavery had been practiced in different West African cultures for centuries, but it had different forms. It wasn't this absolute slavery, this sort of all bets are off, you know, no holds barred slavery. It wasn't chattel slavery where the people were regarded as as sheer property.

Slaves were typically war captives, but when the Europeans came offering cash or more often goods, things like weapons, they transformed it into this profit-making activity. It was in this context that the Kingdom of Dahomey was created and King of Dahomey, Glalie, demanded that the chief of Kosala's town start paying him tribute in yams and he refused to do it and so a little while later, the Dahomey rated Kosala's village. The way he describes it is horrific. They came just before the break of dawn and they carried these enormous knives, these machetes, and they would cut off people's heads. So when he woke, he would have seen like a field of blood, people screaming, people running, people being grabbed by these Dahomean warriors. So he tried to run away, thought that he had succeeded. He ran past this gate and then as soon as he got to the other side, somebody grabbed him. There's quite a heartbreaking moment in in his narration where he says that he wanted to know where his mother was. He pleaded with these warriors to let him go find his mother and and they wouldn't allow him to.

He never saw her again. He was marched for days along with others from his town who had been captured to the city of Wieda. It was there that he encountered William Foster. And you're listening to author Nick Tibor tell the story of the last slave ship to America and the community its captives built. Up next, more with Nick Tibor here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the stories we tell about this great country and especially the stories of America's rich past, know that all of our stories about American history from war to innovation, culture and faith are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all the things that are beautiful in life and all the things that are good in life.

And if you can't get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale.edu to learn more war inflation and over 31 trillion dollars in debt. It's looking like 2008 all over again. Millions of Americans watch their retirement savings disappear while those who invested in physical gold and silver were protected. And if you have $50,000 or more in your IRA, 401k or savings, you could be at risk again. Visit Goldco.com slash IHART to get a free gold IRA kit and learn how thousands are diversifying their retirement savings with gold and silver. IHART listeners could get up to $10,000 in free silver with a qualified account. Goldco is the number one rated precious metals company recommended by Sean Hannity. With over 1 billion dollars in gold and silver placed, an A-plus rating from the Better Business Bureau, thousands of five-star customer reviews, and seven-time Inc. 5000 winner, you'll be in good company. Visit Goldco.com slash IHART to get up to $10,000 in free silver. That's Goldco.com slash IHART. Want to get away but still listen to your favorite radio stations and podcasts?

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Get yours at Walmart today. And we continue with our American stories and the story of Cudjoe Lewis, the last slave ship to America and the community its survivors created. Cudjoe's journey across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa would not have been possible, however, without two men in America. One was a ship captain named William Foster, and the other was a particularly brash businessman and shipping magnate named Timothy Mehar. Let's get back to the story. I don't really believe in the great men theory of history where history is shaped by individual actors who have strong will, but certainly there are people like Mehar.

He reminds me a lot of Thomas Sutpen in Absalom Absalom, this force of nature. He supposedly had a quote-unquote difficulty with the clerk of one of his ships, and he was stabbed or cut by this guy's knife. The paper reported that it's their understanding that it was Mehar's fault, and in another case, he was accused of ramming one of his ships into another vessel, apparently out of spite for the other captain.

This newspaper, they said it's hard to believe that a captain would have done something like that just out of pettiness just because he hated this other captain, but if by some chance it's true, then this guy should be scourged from the river. Timothy Mehar came from an Irish Catholic family in Maine. He came down to Mobile sometime around 1835. The Deep South was still sort of a frontier in that period, and he started working jobs on the river. He started as a deckhand on a ship and worked one job after another, kind of working his way up the ranks and ultimately became a ship captain, and as he was doing that, he was able to save a lot of money and go into business for himself. He built a lumber yard and a shingle factory, and he had a plantation and his own shipyard. The first ship that Mehar had built for himself was called the Orlean St. John.

We think that he named it that after a young woman that he was trying to woo. This ship was extremely fancy. It had 38 cabins. It had a saloon. It had this expensive carpet and furniture, and it reminds me of the Titanic.

It was this much publicized affair. On its maiden voyage, the ship was sailing to Montgomery and Mehar had a timeline. He was trying to get to Montgomery within five days because some of his passengers wanted to catch a train there, but the wind was blowing against him, so he sort of late in the voyage to make up for lost time. He had the boat stocked with firewood so the crew could stuff the furnace and create more steam to power the ship. Sparks from the furnace ignited the stack of logs and the whole boat went up in flames. Everybody had to jump into the cold, muddy water and the newspapers reported that between the people who were burned in the ship and the people who drowned in the river, the death toll reached about 40. Mehar was praised as a hero for trying to save passengers and maybe he did even though he created the conditions for this to happen, but in the end, he received $16,000 in insurance money and he apparently used that money to open his shipyard and there's always been a rumor that one of the people on board was a Navy officer who was carrying like a quarter million dollars worth of gold and the gold was never recovered and the rumor was always that Tim Mehar had brought divers from the Caribbean to go fish the gold out of the out of the silts in the river bottom and that this gold became the basis for his business empire.

That's just a bit of mobile lore. He was also fairly active in politics and he never ran for office, but he did help to support the project of this guy named William Walker, who was trying to create a new colony in Nicaragua. Mehar and other southern businessmen wanted to expand slavery down into Latin America and they wanted Nicaragua to be the first outpost for this and they imagine that Mobile could be the center of this new southern empire that would span the continents, the Southern Republic.

In fact, Mehar had a ship that he called the Southern Republic. Cotton was this extraordinarily valuable commodity. It was similar to what petroleum is in the world economy now and they depended on enslaved people. It had been illegal since 1808 to import slaves from West Africa into the US. If you wanted slaves, then you had to get them from within the United States, but it still wasn't enough.

There was still this sort of this labor crunch in Alabama and Mobile. We have reports from some of the travel logs of the 1850s of hotels resorting to hiring Irish people as servants because they couldn't get enough slaves. So there was a push among southern businessmen in the 1850s to reopen the trans Atlantic slave trade. It was degrading to the South and there was also a convention in the spring of 1859 when these businessmen from all over the South gathered in Vicksburg and by a vast majority, they approved this resolution calling for the repeal of all restrictions on the slave trade. So Mayor was at the center of all that and the way that he told the story is that in 1859 one night he was on a boat that was headed up the Mobile River headed toward Montgomery and he had some passengers from the North on board and they were talking about how James Buchanan's administration had been claiming that it was going to start cracking down on these illegal slave voyages and Mayor supposedly said, I don't believe it.

I'm going to call their bluff. I don't think that there's any way they would actually execute anybody for bringing an illegal slave ship over and he supposedly said, I'm going to prove it by doing it myself and it seems like this was probably both a money-making venture for him. He planned to sell these captives and make a profit, but also an active political protest to call the bluff of the Buchanan administration and show that you could still get away with doing this and that the will to stamp it out really wasn't there.

Later on, the law became that this was not just a boast that Mayor made, but that it was a bet and I think in one case it was reported to be something like $10,000, which would have been an insane amount of money back in 1859. So as for the Clotilda itself, people didn't want to go on slave voyages. Sailors didn't want to go on them.

It was not a desirable line of work. These voyages were horrible. They were dangerous apart from the fact that you were sailing across all the way across the Atlantic Ocean and that was always dangerous. There could be shipwrecks.

A couple of times the Clotilda almost experienced a shipwreck itself. There was also the possibility of slave revolts and the work was just unimaginably filthy. You were dealing with hundreds of captives who had to lie in their own waste and the mortality rate among captives on slave ships was extremely high. People were always dying from the horrific conditions and having to be thrown overboard. The pay was often pretty poor and so it became a common thing during the height of the slave trade to get sailors drunk in gambling houses in a lot of cases to get them blackout drunk and then tell them you have amassed so much gambling debt. The only way you can possibly pay it back is by going on this slave voyage. We don't know much about how the crew of the Clotilda were recruited, but there was this episode in 1859 when the Clotilda was sailing back to Mobile from Texas. The ship was moving fast and there was a skiff in the water.

This small boat with two men on it and when the Clotilda got close, it ended up going across this chain that was connecting the small boat, sort of anchoring it to a log in the river and the little boat flipped over and the Clotilda ended up running over one of the men who had been on the skiff, a black man named Alfred. He was an enslaved person. Alfred's owner ended up suing and Bill Foster was ordered to pay $1500. It's pretty clear from the records that he didn't really own anything besides the Clotilda and so it seems likely that this was about the time that Timothy Mayer would have approached him about sailing to Dahomey and fetching this cargo of slaves. Mayer offered to pay him a cut of the proceeds about half a dozen slaves, which would have been worth thousands of dollars in the market. So Foster agreed to do it. They re-rigged the Clotilda, loaded it with barrels of water, barrels of beef and pork. They stocked it with a bunch of gold and they put lumber on top of the gold in case the ship were searched.

We have one source that says that when they set out their paper said that purpose of the voyage was to haul lumber to Saint Thomas in the Danish Virgin Islands, but Foster, of course, knew that he was actually headed for West Africa. And what a story you're hearing right now and my goodness, Timothy Mayer. Well, he is slavery personified in the South. A very few people benefited from slavery directly and it was generally large plantation owners and traders like this slave traders themselves and people in the shipping business. Timothy Mayer was one such person and he challenged the slave trade prohibitions directly, not just as an act of political protest, but for profit.

When we return more of the story of Africa Town on our American story. you could be at risk again. Visit goldco.com slash I heart to get a free gold IRA kit and learn how thousands are diversifying their retirement savings with gold and silver. I heart listeners could get up to $10,000 in free silver with a qualified account. Gold Co is the number one rated precious metals company recommended by Sean Hannity with over $1 billion in gold and silver placed an A plus rating from the Better Business Bureau. Thousands of five star customer reviews and seven time Inc 5000 winner.

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Get yours at Walmart today. And we continue with our American stories and the final portion of the story of Cudjoe Lewis, the last slave ship to America and the community its survivors created. We return back to the story of Cudjoe Lewis captured and held in the city of Weta. He and the other captives were held in these structures called Barracoons.

They sort of look like sheds and they sort of look like cages. Bamboo poles lashed together and he describes the scene where he and the other captives were ordered to stand in circles of about ten each. They were divided by gender and this white person started making his way through and in each case he would stand in the center of the circle and go around and look at the captives and he would sort of stare them down inspect their bodies pride into their mouths looked at their teeth and if there was somebody that he wanted he would single them out and those people would be let off.

Ultimately he chose well over 100 people. The captives were offered a final meal led to this lagoon that separated Weta from the ocean. He would have been taken across on a canoe and brought into the hold of the Clotilda. For something like two weeks the captives were kept in the hold. Foster wanted to keep them out of sight in case they passed other ships that would have seen them and potentially found that they were making this illegal voyage. After two weeks he decided that the coast was clear and he started bringing them up on deck sort of in shifts. They would be rotated through and the first time they were brought up their muscles were so atrophied that they couldn't stand up or walk and the sailors had to support them. Maybe one maybe three. I've heard it speculated that as many as seven people died.

Cudjoe always said afterward that it had been a 70-day journey but the best evidence we have suggested it took about 45 days. Abraham Lincoln imposed a blockade on all the Confederate ports right at the beginning of the war in the spring of 1861 and stationed a ship at Mobile Bay. So prices of food shot way up. There are reports of a bread riot on the plantation. Food was in short supply for Cudjoe and the other shipmates. They didn't have any coffee so they would part rice and drink the water and in the spring of 1865 thousands of Union soldiers marched into the city and Cudjoe tells the story about being on one of the mayor's ships but Jim Mayer who was gonna captain the voyage who they were waiting for he hadn't shown up. Cudjoe thought this was odd and he saw some Union soldiers picking berries from mulberry trees and the soldiers saw him and the other enslaved men there and said oh you guys are free like you don't belong to anyone anymore and they didn't really understand what does that mean for us then where where are we going and they said go wherever you feel like going you're not slaves anymore. So some of the other shipmates who were farther up in Mobile County who were on the plantation of Burns Mayer who was the brother of Tim and Jim. These people came down to celebrate with the other shipmates and they said that they made a drum and they played it like they would have done back in West Africa. The lore in Africa town has always been that the shipmates knew more about being free than they did about being slaves because they had been free for their whole lives and the lore in the neighborhood is that the shipmates had to teach emancipated people who had grown up in America how to be free.

So they taught the American-born people how to hunt, how to fish, how to live as independent people. What they wanted most of all was to go back home. There's even an account of them saving their money, pooling their money. Some of them were working at a sawmill that belonged to Timothy Mayer and they saved their wages and put them together, approached Bill Foster and asked him if they could pay him to take them back to their homes and Foster said the amount of money you have here is not nearly enough.

There's no way you're going to be able to save up enough money to pay me for that. So that plan fell apart and they decided that that their best option was to create a home for themselves in Alabama. They started pooling their money to buy property. They asked Timothy Mayer if he would give them some land. They felt like it was the least he could do, but he became furious when Cudjoe asked him. He said he had taken good care of them during the years that they were working on his plantation and he didn't owe them anything more. They ended up buying property from him at full price and they created this settlement that became known as Africantown. They appointed this man named Gunpa to be their chief. He was actually from Dahomey, the country that enslaved them originally, but after he had endured captivity with them, he'd experienced the Middle Passage with them. He'd been a slave along with them.

They felt like there was no difference between Gunpa and them. So he was their leader and they also appointed two others to be their judges, but Cudjoe did become the sexton of Union Baptist Church, which was the church that the shipmates founded. They didn't feel as if they had abandoned the religion that they grew up with. They felt like they had always worshiped God, but in America, they learned more about God through Christianity. Cudjoe said to one person, we always knew about God, but we didn't know that God had a son. That was one thing that they did love about being here. One of Cudjoe's grandsons had this memory of reading to him from the Psalms and he said there were moments when there would be a word that he couldn't pronounce, so he would skip over it and Cudjoe knew the Psalms so well that he would always notice when his grandson did this.

He would say you're skipping something there. There was such a deep feeling of community. We estimate that the population was around 15,000 at one time. A lot of these families were huge.

It wasn't uncommon for a family to have eight or ten kids. They were fairly poor and most of the roads were unpaved, but the community was rich. I think that to understand what happened there, you have to go back to Reconstruction.

One of my favorite Americans, I have to say, is Thaddeus Stevens, one of the Radical Republican legislators. He gave this speech where he said, if we're really serious about bringing the South to heel and doing right by the enslaved people, what we ought to do is break up the plantations and give it all to the emancipated people. We would both break up the power of the Southern aristocracy and we would create this broad class of black independent farmers.

Of course, this didn't happen. Instead, the Mayer family ended up holding on to most of this land that surrounded Africa Town and in the 1920s, the grandson of Timothy Mayer leased a bunch of this property to a northern paper conglomerate and this enormous paper mill was built on the edge of the community. Another factor here is that in 1901, Alabama established a new constitution which stripped black people of their voting rights.

So the shipmates and their descendants had very little money, very little land and no political voice and so they had no way of making decisions about whether heavy industry would be sited near their homes or not. I think the story of Africa Town gives us a rare opportunity to see how the mechanics of racism actually work. I also think that the legacy of Africa Town is a legacy of self determination and defiance. They never passively endured the hardships that were inflicted on them. When they were freed after the war, they took it upon themselves to buy property and carve out their own little civilization in Alabama, their own little Republic.

There's this anecdote about Cudjoe being hit by a train when he was middle-aged to elderly and he actually sued the railroad company and won in court. I think that's another example of the defiance of this community and it continues to the present day where residents have kept the stories alive for generations. Even for decades when people said that the story of the Clotilda was just a hoax and at long last, the world has taken notice and recognized that the stories were always true and that this is one of the great overlooked stories of American history. And a terrific job on the editing, production, and storytelling by our own Monty Montgomery and a special thanks to author Nick Tabor and his book is Africa Town, the last slave ship to America and the community its captives built. And my goodness, I love that line where he said the shipmates knew more about being free than being a slave because they had just gotten here and they were never slaves back in Africa. What they really wanted was to go back home. The option was too expensive, so they decided to pool their money and build homes, a town, a settlement all their own 15,000 strong, big families, strong culture, poor in money, rich in spirit, and so many other ways.

The story of Africa Town here on Our American Story. Skin's complicated, but skin care shouldn't be. That's where Versed comes in. They're pretty well versed in skin, which means you get high performance dermatologist tested products at prices your bank account appreciates. Ready to build a regimen? Start with the skin decoder quiz. Just answer a few questions about your skin type concerns and goals for a personalized routine.

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