SUMMARY
In July 1860, a schooner called the Clotilda was quietly brought into Mobile Bay, on the Alabama Gulf Coast, carrying nearly 110 captives from West Africa. The voyage was illegal—Congress had long since banned the importation of enslaved people—and after the ship had been unloaded, the captain torched it and sank it. It was the last successful slave voyage in U.S. history. The Civil War erupted nine months later, and no one was prosecuted for the crime.
Many of the survivors were in their teens and twenties. After they were emancipated in 1865, they had no way of getting back home. A group of them found jobs, pooled their wages, and bought property outside of Mobile. They established a settlement that became known as African Town.
Over time, thousands of African Americans moved to the area, and the founders' descendants assimilated. Many newcomers were lured by jobs at the massive paper factories on either side of the neighborhood. The place thrived in the postwar era, becoming almost a town unto itself. It was annexed into Mobile piece by piece.
As of 2022, it’s still intact, and a share of the residents are direct descendants of the founders. The neighborhood is an unmatched historical treasure. But the industrial footprint is now overwhelming—thanks in part to the wealthy descendants of the man who chartered the slave ship, who have leased and sold off much of the surrounding land. A highway designed for industrial traffic has obliterated the business district, and there’s some evidence that factory pollution has created a cancer epidemic.
In late 2019, I moved to Mobile, leaving a job at New York Magazine, to solve an anthropological mystery: what was the connection between the slave ship and the pollution? Why—and how, exactly—did Africatown get singled out to bear the collateral damage of heavy industry?
In Africatown: America’s Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created, my narration starts in West Africa in the 1850s and progresses decade by decade, showing how the Jim Crow legal structure shaped the very geography of Mobile as it industrialized. By extension, it shows how environmental racism works everywhere, from Houston to Flint to the South Bronx. The book draws on hundreds of documents that have never before been cited, in addition to scores of interviews.
The story is ultimately hopeful. It’s framed by the remarkable work of present-day activists, many of them born and raised in Africatown, who are trying to rescue the neighborhood by making it a destination for heritage tourism.