Africatown

Africatown, community in Mobile, Alabama, that was established by survivors of the last forced voyage of enslaved Africans to the United States. It is the only American community ever created by West Africans who had personally survived the Middle Passage.

Over time, the surrounding area became increasingly industrialized, and many other Black Americans moved there. The descendants of the Clotilda survivors integrated into mainstream society. In the 21st century a version of the neighbourhood still survives, but it is ensconced by heavy industry. Many residents and allies hope to reverse its fortunes by transforming it into a destination for heritage tourism.

Establishment

The men and women who established Africatown arrived on the Clotilda in 1860. There is some dispute regarding where in western Africa the Clotilda survivors came from, but the leading theories are that most came from what is now either Benin or Nigeria. The majority were kidnapped from their towns or villages by representatives of Dahomey, a West African kingdom that sold many of its captives to European and American traders. Upon their arrival in the United States, more than half of the 110 enslaved people on the Clotilda were forced to work for Timothy Meaher, the shipyard owner who had chartered the voyage, or for his brothers, on plantations outside of Mobile. Some of the others were sold to buyers who lived in upstate Alabama and perhaps farther away.

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The Clotilda survivors who were living in the greater Mobile area were freed five years after their arrival, as the Civil War came to an end in April 1865 and Union forces entering Mobile began enforcing the Emancipation Proclamation (1863). Their first hope was to arrange for a ship to take them back to West Africa. But, over time, they resigned themselves to staying in the United States. They found manual-labour jobs—for instance, cutting timber and making shingles—and saved from their wages until they could buy land in a remote part of Mobile county, some of which was purchased from the Meaher family. Their settlement, in which they autonomously appointed their own leaders and communicated in the languages of their homeland (such as Yoruba), came to be known as African Town, or the African Village. Other neighbourhoods clustered around it or overlapped it—including Plateau, Magazine Point, Kelly Hills, Happy Hill, and Lewis Quarters—all of them majority-Black.

Growth of Africatown and absorption into Mobile

By the turn of the 20th century the area was heavily populated, but the leaders of Mobile declined to bring it into the city limits. Basic municipal services like sewers and plumbing were not extended there until the 1960s. Lynchings near African Town surged in 1906 and 1907.

A school for African American children, which would become known as the Mobile County Training School, opened there in 1910. Its founder was Isaiah J. Whitley, a young devotee of Booker T. Washington. After a fire in 1915, the school received funding from the Northern philanthropist Julius Rosenwald to build a new facility. The writer Albert Murray, who grew up in Magazine Point, graduated there in 1935.

In the 1920s and ’30s, two massive paper mills opened near Plateau and Magazine Point, partly on land belonging to the Meaher family. Over the next several decades, thousands more people moved to the area for jobs, and the population grew exponentially. It was annexed into Mobile’s city limits in stages between 1945 and 1960.

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Pollution began plaguing the area, thanks to the paper mills. Ash routinely filled the sky, and wastewater flooded the local waterways and contaminated the fish..

Legacy and discovery of the Clotilda

By mid-century, the Clotilda story was not widely discussed in the neighbourhood, and some historians believed it was only a myth. But starting as early as the 1950s, a local welder named Henry C. Williams led a campaign for the area to get international recognition. It was Williams’s idea to bring back the original name (which he shortened to “AfricaTown”) and to promote the place as a heritage tourism destination. In the 1980s a series of AfricaTown Folk Festivals brought Black celebrities, including the comedian Dick Gregory and the author Alex Haley, to the area—along with delegations of diplomats from western Africa. However, at the same time, the state of Alabama moved ahead with a plan to destroy the central business district and build a highway for industrial cargo there instead. Historical records corroborate local claims that several of the homes demolished in this project had been built by Clotilda survivors.

Williams died in 2008, and by then the efforts to promote Africatown’s history had mostly dwindled. But they were renewed by other activists in the 2010s and received a boost in 2019, when archaeologists announced that the wreckage of the Clotilda had been identified in the Mobile River delta.

Since 2007 the Clotilda and Africatown have been the subject of several books, and they were also featured in the 2022 Netflix documentary Descendant, which was presented by Higher Ground, the production company of Barack and Michelle Obama.

In July 2023 the Africatown Heritage House opened in the neighbourhood, with plans for a visitor centre to follow.