On August 17, 2022, Ben Raines presented “The Last Slave Ship–The Clotilda, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning” as part of the History Is Lunch series.
Fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed, the Clotilda became the last ship to bring enslaved Africans to the United States. After its arrival in Mobile Bay in July 1860, the ship was scuttled and burned to hide the crime and allow the wealthy perpetrators to escape prosecution. After the Civil War the captives of the Clotilda founded the community Africatown north of Mobile. Zora Neale Hurston visited in 1927 and told their story in her bestselling book Barracoon, which was published eighty years later.
In 2018 the journalist Ben Raines found the sunken wreck.
“Clotilda is a ghost haunting three communities—the descendants of those transported into slavery, the descendants of their fellow Africans who sold them, and the descendants of their American enslavers,” said Raines, author of The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning. “At the turn of the century, descendants of the captain who financed the Clotilda’s journey lived nearby—where, as significant players in the local real estate market, they disenfranchised and impoverished residents of Africatown.”
Joshua Rothman, author of The Ledger and the Chain, wrote that “The Last Slave Ship is all at once the true story of a terrible crime and its survivors, a riveting account of discovering the evidence its perpetrators hoped would never be found, and a moving attempt to grapple with its legacy.
Ben Raines is an environmental journalist and filmmaker. He earned his BFA from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Raines is the author of The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning. He wrote and directed The Underwater Forest, an award-winning film about the exploration of a 70,000-year-old cypress forest found off the Alabama coast, and wrote and produced America’s Amazon, which has aired on PBS stations around the country. He is the author of Saving America’s Amazon and co-author of Heart of a Patriot with U.S. Senaor Max Cleland. A U.S. Coast Guard-licensed captain, Raines guides tours of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta and Alabama’s barrier islands.
History Is Lunch is sponsored by the John and Lucy Shackelford Charitable Fund of the Community Foundation for Mississippi. The weekly lecture series of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History explores different aspects of the state's past. The hour-long programs are held in the Craig H. Neilsen Auditorium of the Museum of Mississippi History and Mississippi Civil Rights Museum building at 222 North Street in Jackson and livestreamed on YouTube and Facebook.
