The Last Slave Ship Quotes

“Sports, particularly baseball, took on an outsize importance in Africatown. In addition to the teams for the school, each neighborhood and sometimes each street fielded its own baseball team, complete with uniforms. By the 1950s, kids coming out of Africatown’s baseball leagues were earning college scholarships, and often a chance to try out for the major leagues. In the 1960s, there were six men on Major League Baseball teams who grew up playing against each other on the Mobile County Technical School’s baseball diamond, a stunning feat for the tiny community. Two of Africatown’s sons, Cleon Jones and Tommie Agee, were stars on the World Series–winning New York Mets of 1969 known as the “Miracle Mets.” Cleon made the game-winning catch that clinched the championship for New York. All of Africatown crowded around radios during the game and erupted in cheers when they heard their hometown hero had won the game.”
― Ben Raines, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning

“When people talk about slavery, they think they are talking about Africa,” said Nathalie Blanc Chekete, with Benin’s National Agency for the Promotion of Heritage and the Development of Tourism. “But slavery was something that happened once they reached America or Brazil. What happened in Africa was deportation, where Africans took other Africans away from their lands and families and sent them away forever.”
― Ben Raines, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning

“I am a prince of Dahomey. It was my father’s ancestors who did this,” Posset said, explaining that he, like the mayor of Abomey, had royal lineage. “But my mother was Yoruba. Her ancestors came here to this country [America] forcibly, they didn’t choose. And it was my father’s family who sold my mother’s family. This is why I wept. I was insulting those who sold them back home. No money, no articles, no stuff can buy a life, but we sold our people. Brothers sold their brothers and sisters. Fathers sold kids and wife. I will never blame those who came here. I will always beg them for forgiveness.”
― Ben Raines, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning

“You know that saying, the truth will set you free? Well, the ship is the truth. All the Black folks in America got here chained up on ships just like that.”
― Ben Raines, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning

“Before the ship was even discovered, Africatown’s activist groups applied for and won a $3.8 million grant from Alabama’s share of the BP oil spill settlement money, to build a new welcome center on the hill above the cemetery, to replace the destroyed mobile home. Then, in the wake of the ship’s discovery, another federal grant was given to create a “heritage center” in the community, which will be the initial facility designed to hold any relics found in the hold of the ship. But neither the welcome center nor the heritage center will be anything close to the scale and power of the new Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. To”
― Ben Raines, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning

“The Gullah descendants—who were geographically isolated on barrier islands and remained socially isolated as those islands became playgrounds for wealthy beachgoers—have managed to turn their cultural provenance into a tourist draw, with museums, a heritage trail, and a healthy schedule of public events. Many of the people living in or tied to Africatown want to create something similar.”
― Ben Raines, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning

“They focused variously on successfully getting Africatown listed on the National Register of Historic Places, restoring the town’s housing stock to attract new residents, creating business connections to Africa, fighting the expansion of heavy industry, working to clean up legacy pollution, restoring the town’s access to the river, and trying to keep county officials from closing Africatown’s aging school.”
― Ben Raines, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning

“Long before the ship was found, a core group in Africatown worked to promote the Clotilda history, going back decades. For some, the goal was simply to honor their ancestors and the story of their struggle. Others wanted to use that history as a way to draw people in, to resurrect Africatown, to restore the prosperity and vitality they remembered from childhood.”
― Ben Raines, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning

“Cleon Jones, the baseball hero, became a one-man Habitat for Humanity with his Last Out Society, organizing volunteers to paint houses, mow lawns, and try to restore the community’s curb appeal.”
― Ben Raines, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning

“Saving America’s Amazon,”
― Ben Raines, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning

“Compounding matters was Mobile’s four-hundred-year history as a seaport. More than 280 shipwrecks have been located in Mobile Bay and the swamp immediately to the north. Most remain unidentified. Some of them are ships that sank as early as the 1600s. Others are ships or barges that were intentionally sunk after they’d become too worn-out to sail. Wooden ships like the Clotilda had a fairly short working life of about twenty-five years. Built before the revolution in construction techniques brought on by the mass production of screws, nuts, and bolts in the 1870s and ’80s, the wooden sailing vessels of the Clotilda era were held together with nothing but giant nails. Decades at sea, with the constant stress of rising and falling waves, gradually loosened them, making the ships leakier and leakier, until eventually they were no longer seaworthy. As a result, several bayous around Mobile Bay are well-known “ship graveyards” where old vessels were beached or sunk to get them out of the way of the shipping channels and rivers.”
― Ben Raines, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning

“One hundred percent of the nearly 1 million pounds of chloroform released in Mobile County in 1988 was released in Africatown. Chloroform is classified as a probable carcinogen by the EPA. Chronic long-term exposure, such as one would experience living in the shadow of two paper mills, can cause liver disease and affect the central nervous system. One hundred percent of the chlorine dioxide in the county was released in Africatown. Nearly all of the 1.8 million pounds of hydrochloric acid released in the county in 1988 was released in Africatown. Nearly all of the acetone, methanol, xylene, chlorine, methyl ethyl ketone, and toluene released in the county were released in Africatown. The chemicals are linked to cancer, birth defects, fertility problems, kidney and liver damage, nose and throat irritation, asthma, and loss of hearing and color vision.”
― Ben Raines, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning

“The most insidious of the destructive forces behind Africatown’s demise involves the paper mills, which were at the heart of a billion-dollar lawsuit filed by residents. After seventy years as the main employers of Africatown’s residents, both mills shut down in 2000. Suddenly, nearly two thousand jobs disappeared, along with the perpetual and noxious stench associated with paper making. But the job losses were just a scratch on the surface compared to the real, almost invisible damage the mills had inflicted. To fully understand the story, we must step back in time to the 1980s, to a time when environmental laws in Alabama were essentially meaningless. Today, Alabama ranks last in the nation for what it spends to protect the environment, and is widely regarded by industry trade groups as the most permissive state in the country when it comes to setting or enforcing pollution limits. Back in the eighties and nineties, things were much worse. James Warr, who was the head of the Alabama Department of Environmental Management from its inception in the 1980s until the early 2000s, was opposed to vigorous application of environmental regulations for businesses. He was an odd fit for the head of an environmental agency tasked with regulating polluters, but I believe that is precisely why he was chosen—to ensure that the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act didn’t slow industrial production in Alabama. I was an environment reporter for the Mobile newspaper for eighteen years, beginning in 2000, and had numerous interactions with Warr and his agency. During an interview in 2003, Warr told me that the federal Superfund law was illegal and he had no intention of enforcing it or adding new sites in Alabama to the list.”
― Ben Raines, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning

“For years, the community couldn’t even get a traffic light installed on the highway so they could get from the church to the cemetery on the other side for funerals. The highway made Africatown a broken community, separating its three main neighborhoods from each other for the first time since the town was founded.”
― Ben Raines, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning

“After 1965, people in Africatown could shop anywhere they wanted. Cars had become common in the community, and the larger markets and department stores of Mobile’s downtown shopping district were just a three-minute ride away. Likewise, desegregation meant African-Americans were no longer confined to living near the few schools available to the Black population. People started moving out, to other parts of Mobile, or to several small African-American towns that surround Africatown, places where you couldn’t smell the overpowering stench from the paper mills. Contributing to the problem was a sudden dearth of housing when the Meaher clan decided to get out of the house rental business in 1967, after building more than five hundred rental houses in Africatown since the 1880s. Residents say the family simply moved people out and bulldozed the houses, destroying much of the area’s longtime housing stock.”
― Ben Raines, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning

“Two of Africatown’s sons, Cleon Jones and Tommie Agee, were stars on the World Series–winning New York Mets of 1969 known as the “Miracle Mets.” Cleon made the game-winning catch that clinched the championship for New York. All of Africatown crowded around radios during the game and erupted in cheers when they heard their hometown hero had won the game.”
― Ben Raines, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning

“Since his conversion to Christianity in 1869, Cudjo would point to the sky and say that when he died, “I want to go yonder.” His last words to Roche as she left his house for the final time were, “When they tell you Cudjo is dead say ‘No! Cudjo is not dead—he has gone to heaven to rest.’ ” The last of the Africatown settlers went yonder on July 26, 1935. He was buried in the hillside graveyard just beyond his front door, next to his wife, children, and shipmates.”
― Ben Raines, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning

“The money allowed the school to significantly expand and saw it renamed Mobile County Training School.”
― Ben Raines, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning

“In 1927, the school started by the Africans, then known as the “Plateau Normal and Industrial Institute for the Education of the Head, Heart and Hands of the Colored Youth,” received a grant from the Rosenwald Fund to build a new, much larger school, with ten classrooms and living quarters for ten teachers. The fund was the brainchild of Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald, the CEO of Sears, Roebuck and Co. The pair met in Chicago in 1911, after Rosenwald attended a speech by Washington. Rosenwald, whose fortune would have ranked him as a billionaire by today’s standards, was looking for a philanthropic cause to answer what he believed were “the special duties that capitalists and men of wealth owed to society.” Rosenwald provided an endowment for Washington’s Tuskegee Institute and embraced Washington’s dream of funding schools across the South to teach what the educator described as “industrial education.”
― Ben Raines, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning

“Oh Lor’! Lor’! De wife she de eyes to de man’s soul. How kin I see now, when I ain’ gottee de eyes no mo’?”
― Ben Raines, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning

“Scott’s eight novels, published under the pen name Sidney McCall, were well received in their day, and her poetry, often centering on flowers, was published in newspapers across the country. The article under consideration here, titled “Affika Town,” was also published widely. It includes the only interview conducted with Noah Hart, who as Timothy Meaher’s houseboy had a front-row seat to the Clotilda story. Scott wrote the breezy feature after her “pretty New York cousin,” came to town and asked to visit “an African Village near here. I have heard it spoken of so often.” It”
― Ben Raines, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning

“Meanwhile, the death of Timothy Meaher in 1892 reminded the nation of the story of the Clotilda and kindled new interest into what had become of her passengers. Obituaries in the Mobile Daily Advertiser and Register, the New York Times, and papers all over the nation, described Meaher as “the venerable steamboat man” and “swashbuckling.” But most of the ink in every obituary was spent telling the story of the Clotilda and the creation of Africatown. Many of the obituaries included descriptions of the settlement, such as this from the hometown Daily Advertiser and Register: “They mix very little with other negroes and preserve many of their native customs, using their native language, speaking English with difficulty and being ruled by a queen of their own choosing. They enjoy a high reputation for honesty and industry.”
― Ben Raines, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning

“The Africans fervently embraced Christianity, but they did not want to attend one of the established churches in the area. Cudjo said they didn’t want to “mixee wid de other folks what laught at us.” Too many of the members of those churches mocked the Africans for the way they spoke and the habits that identified them as foreigners. Instead, the Africans decided to build themselves a church where they could worship without scorn. The first version of the church was a brush arbor in a clearing next to Cudjo’s house. In time, they built a classic wooden church with a steeple and bell and called it the Old Landmark Baptist Church. Today, the sturdy brick edifice of the Union Baptist Church sits on the same spot. About a hundred yards away stands a brick chimney that used to be attached to Gumpa’s house. It is the last structure built by the Africans that is still standing”
― Ben Raines, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning

“Cudjo is the son which is born on Monday, that’s what this name means in our language. As we break it down though, Cu is death. Jo is liberation. Together it means death is gone, or free from death, or born again. It is possible he said his name was Cu Jo, but there was a problem with the translation a century ago. If I say ‘Cu Jo’ it is different than ‘Cudjo,’ ” Guely explained. “I think maybe he was talking about himself with that name. Kossula in his homeland was dead. But he still lived, in a new life. He was Cu Jo, dead and reborn.” A”
― Ben Raines, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning

“Cudjo picked up the last name Lewis at this time. It was not his first choice. At first, he tried to approximate Western-style names by adding his father’s name—O-lo-loo-ay—as his last name. “But it too long for de people to call it. It too crooked lak Kossula. So dey call me Cudjo Lewis,” he told Hurston.”
― Ben Raines, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning

“As they started buying property and interacting with the government and organizations like the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Africans, like all newly emancipated Black people, had to formalize their names, and come up with both a first and a last name. They needed full names to become U.S. citizens, which they accomplished in 1868, less than three years after they were freed. And they needed names so they could vote, which they tried to do for the first, and perhaps only, time in 1874, in one of the most contentious elections in U.S. history, marred by racial violence across the South. It was a bold and dangerous step, and required much persistence on the part of the Africans. They told the story to Roche in great detail.”
― Ben Raines, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning

“This group split up the seven-acre parcel, which was about a half mile away from the property purchased from Meaher. It has come to be known as “Lewis Quarters,” and the eight neat and tidy homes in the neighborhood are still inhabited today by descendants of the Africans.”
― Ben Raines, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning

“The next purchase was made by a group that had been enslaved on Thomas Buford’s plantation, about a ten-minute walk through the woods from the property bought from Meaher. Included among the group with Charlie Lewis, his wife, and several other Clotilda couples was an American-born couple who had also been enslaved on the Buford plantation. Horace and Matilda Ely were the first non-Africans invited to live in African Town. They would not be the last.”
― Ben Raines, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning

“We call our village Affican Town. We say dat ’cause we want to go back in de Affica soil and we see we cain go. Derefo’ we make Affica where dey fetch us.… We here and we got to stay.”
― Ben Raines, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning

“One of the Africans’ first communal decisions was to ask Timothy Meaher to give them a piece of his land around Magazine Point so they could build houses. He had plenty of land, they reasoned, some of it purchased with the money they had made for him through five years of free labor. They appointed Cudjo to talk with Meaher. His chance to approach Timothy came when the old captain came strolling through a section of forest where Cudjo was chopping trees for the mill. Meaher sat down on a felled log and started whittling on a stick. The conversation occurred where the elementary school in Africatown stands today.”
― Ben Raines, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning