The unpunished crimes of the Clotilda — and Alabama

  The Clotilda isn’t the most important part of the Clotilda story.

  That’s not to say Alabama shouldn’t do everything in its power to preserve the rotting remains of that ship, the last known to have brought enslaved people to the United States.

  Since the Alabama Historical Commission announced the discovery of the Clotilda in 2019, there has been talk about raising the ship off the banks of the Mobile River and putting it on display as a memorial to the 110 men and women kidnapped from Africa in 1860, forced onto the ship, and sent into slavery in Alabama.

Descendants of last slave ship arriving in U.S. share history with students

  Earlier this spring, a group of college students from Auburn University, Chicago’s Governors State University, and members of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Auburn traveled by boat to a narrow stretch of the Mobile River, just north of the Mobile Bay Delta in Alabama. Along with them were a journalism professor and a handful of people whose ancestors had traveled the same route in 1860.

  Fifty-two years after the U.S. banned the trafficking of African people to this country for the purpose of slave labor, 110 people who had been kidnapped from present-day Benin arrived in Mobile in anguish, hands bound. After the Clotilda was unloaded, the captain sank it upstream from the port city to conceal his crime. It was the last known ship engaged in trafficking enslaved African people to the U.S.