A shipwreck awash in Black history takes center stage in Alabama

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July 8, 2023

By Donna M. Ownes, NBC

“Clotilda: The Exhibition” opens at the Africatown Heritage House on July 8. (Tiffany Pogue)

On July 8, 1860, a schooner carrying 110 men, women and children stolen from Africa sailed into waters near Mobile Bay under the cover of night.

The Clotilda, the last documented slave ship to enter America, made its surreptitious voyage some five decades after the international slave trade was outlawed, amid one of the most pivotal periods in U.S. history. The following year, 1861, the Civil War would erupt over slavery.

Now, 163 years later, “Clotilda: The Exhibition” at the new Africatown Heritage House tells the stories of the people aboard that ship, conjuring their collective resilience and the ways they survived and thrived amid unfathomable challenges.

[…]

Through interpretive text panels, documents and artifacts, this landmark exhibition focuses on the survivors: from their individual West African beginnings to their enslavement, and eventual freedom and settlement of a 19th century community dubbed Africatown in Mobile.

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