We all should rise, above the clouds of ignorance, narrowness, and selfishness. – Booker T. Washington
On March 2, 1807, Congress banned the importation of slaves from Africa. The law took effect on January 1, 1808. The law stipulated that violators were to be fined $800 (for knowingly buying illegally imported slaves) to $20,000 (for equipping a slave ship) or imprisoned. State legislatures would decide the fates of the illegally imported slaves. The new law, owing to anti-Black sentiments and government inefficiency, was poorly enforced.
Mobile, Alabama holds the unenviable distinction of being the port of entry for the last cargo of slaves kidnapped and brought into this nation. In 1859 the schooner Clotilde (or Clotilda), under the command of William Foster, arrived in Mobile Bay carrying a cargo of Africans, numbering between 110 and 160 slaves. Captain Foster worked for Timothy Meaher, a wealthy Mobile shipper and shipyard owner, who had built the Clotilde in 1856. Local lore claims that Meaher bet some “Northern gentlemen” that he could violate the 1807 law without getting caught. The Clotilde was a 2-masted schooner, 86 feet long and 23 feet wide, with a copper hull. Meaher learned through word of mouth that West African Tribes were fighting and that the King of Dahomey was willing to trade Africans for $50 each at Whydah, Dahomey. Foster arrived in Whydah on May 15, 1859. He bought the Africans from several different tribes and headed back to Mobile.
By the time the Clotilde arrived, federal authorities had been alerted to the illegal scheme. Captain Foster, fearful of criminal charges, arrived at night, transferred his cargo to a riverboat and burned the Clotilde before sinking it. The Africans were distributed to those having a financial interest in the Clotilde expedition with Meaher retaining 30 of the Africans on a property near Mobile. Cudjo (sometimes Cudjoe) Lewis was among that group.
Mobile, Alabama was in the Deep South and blacks, Africans or native-born people, occupied the bottom rung in a racial hierarchy. The Africans brought on the Clotilde could not be legally enslaved; however, they were treated as chattel. Cudjo and 30 others were “illegally” the property of Meaher. The American Civil War ended six years after the illegal enslavement of the Africans brought on the Clotilde. They were freed. The Africans settled in Plateau, Alabama, a poor rural community near Mobile. They called their community Africatown. They adopted their own rules and leaders, and “having been Christianized before their emancipation” they established the African Church. They worked hard. The women used their agricultural skills to raise crops and sell them. Men worked in mills for $1 a day; in time using the money to purchase the land. When possible, they avoided whites.
Cudjo Lewis (African name, Kazoola) was the last survivor of the Clotilde. In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston, the famous African American writer, interviewed Lewis for the Journal of Negro History. He was often interviewed by reporters. He told stories about the civil wars in West Africa and the plight of the losers: being sold into slavery. That is what happened to him and the others on the Clotilde. They were West African; they were the Tarkar people. Cudjo recounted how he was captured by warriors from neighboring Dahomey and taken to Whydah and imprisoned in a slave compound. He was sold by the King of Dahomey to William Foster and then forcibly transported to the United States. The Tarkar asked to be repatriated, were denied, and therefore, tried to recreate their homeland in Mobile. They spoke their native language, used African gardening and cooking techniques, did everything they could to retain their West African culture.
For many years, Cudjo Lewis served as a spokesman for the Tarkar people living in Africatown. He was visited by many prominent blacks, including Booker T. Washington. Cudjo Lewis eventually came to believe that the Africans had to adopt their new country, even though their white countrymen often treated them brutally. There is a church in Africatown called Union Baptist and nearby is the Cudjo Lewis Memorial Statue. In 1997 there was a campaign to have the community declared a historical site. Cudjo Lewis died in 1935 at the age of 114. He may not have been the last African enslaved in the United States, but he was the last survivor of the last known ship to bring Africans as slave cargo into this country.
David Pilgrim, Curator.
Jim Crow Museum (2005)
But, wait, there’s more. (Critical Race Truth.)
In addition to being the last slave ship, the Clotilda carried the woman who has now been identified as the last survivor of the US-African slave trade.
A woman named Redoshi was kidnapped in Benin at the age 12 and sent to America aboard the Clotilda, according to research from a lecturer at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom.
Redoshi died in Alabama in 1937, two years after Oluale Kossola, or Cudjo Lewis, who was previously thought to have been the last survivor of the US slave trade.
While other people born into slavery would have lived past 1937, Redoshi was the last surviving slave abducted from Africa.
It Gets Better. (From Wikipedia)
Redoshi (c. 1848 – 1937) was a West African woman taken to the U.S. state of Alabama as a girl in 1860. Until a later surviving claimant, Matilda McCrear, was announced in 2020 [WHAT!?], she was considered to have been the last surviving victim of the transatlantic slave trade. Taken captive in warfare at age 12 from the Slave Coast of West Africa, she was sold to Americans and transported by ship to the United States, in violation of U.S. law. She was sold again and enslaved on the upcountry plantation of the Washington Smith family in Dallas County, Alabama, where her owner renamed her Sally Smith.
Redoshi survived slavery and the imposition of Jim Crow laws during the post-Reconstruction era of disenfranchisement, and lived into the Great Depression. She lived long enough to become acquainted with people active in the civil rights movement; she is the only known female transatlantic slavery survivor to have been filmed and to have been interviewed for a newspaper.
Redoshi lived in a village in West Africa, in today’s Benin. The name “Redoshi” is unknown in West Africa, though 14 names similar to it appear in the African Origins database. Her village was attacked in a raid by Dahomey people, who killed her father (possibly a village leader) and took her captive at about age 12, around 1860. They sold her to the American captain of the illegal slave ship Clotilda. She was forced to marry another captive, a man also from West Africa who was already married and spoke a different language. Her husband was later referred to as “Uncle Billy” or “Yawith”.
After the ship reached Mobile, Alabama, where Meaher lived, Redoshi was sold with her husband to Washington Smith, a planter in Dallas County, Alabama, about 15 miles (24 km) west of Selma. Smith was a wealthy man who owned a big plantation in Bogue Chitto. He also had a townhouse in Selma and was among the founders of the Bank of Selma. He renamed her “Sally Smith” and put her to work in the fields and sometimes the big house.
Apparently, two of the Dahomey people who had kidnapped Redoshi and her kinfolk were also taken captive and transported to North America on the same slave ship. They worked alongside Redoshi in the fields, and she never forgave them.
After emancipation, Redoshi (aged 17) and her husband Yawith continued to live on the plantation, working as sharecroppers. Washington Smith died in 1869, but his wife continued to run the plantation. Together with advance merchants and others, the planters essentially controlled the finances of the sharecroppers and settled annual accounts to their own benefit. Redoshi and her husband survived, though in poverty; they may have owned land in or near Bogue Chitto.
The couple had a daughter together and raised her. Although she adopted Christianity, Redoshi also practiced her African religious traditions and taught them to her daughter. Yawith died in the 1910s or 1920s; Redoshi died in 1937. Her daughter was listed on the U.S. Census and in marriage documents variously as “Leasy”, “Luth A.”, “Lethe”, “Letia”, and “Lethy”, and had children.
Scholar Hannah Durkin of Newcastle University pieced together an account of Redoshi’s life and concluded that she was the last survivor of the slaves transported by the illegal slaver’s ship Clotilda and of the transatlantic slave trade. Previously historians believed that Cudjoe Lewis (Kossola) was the last survivor of the transatlantic slave trade. A spokesman for Africatown in Mobile, he was interviewed by numerous people. His life was written about by Emma Langdon Roche in a 1914 book and by Zora Neale Hurston in a 1928 article. Hurston returned to Alabama to interview him over a period of months and wrote a book about him, but it was not published until 2018, long after her death, as Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”. The appendix lists Sally Smith as having a son, Jessie Smith, a farmer, but Redoshi’s only known child was a daughter.
_in_The_Negro_Farmer_(1938).jpg)
Durkin noted the limited number of sources that refer to the West African woman: notes and a letter by Zora Neale Hurston to Langston Hughes, not published during her lifetime; a Montgomery, Alabama, newspaper interview from 1932; a federal government educational film from 1938, in which she briefly appears; a brief account in the memoir of a civil-rights activist, and various data from the U.S. Census and other records. They are “fragmentary, frequently contradictory…[;] The gaps and inconsistencies across these materials help to underscore the inexpressibility of transatlantic slavery as a lived experience”.
In 1928, Hurston had written to her friend Langston Hughes about her travels in Alabama interviewing African Americans. She said that Lewis was not the only survivor of the Clotilda: she had also met a “most delightful” woman, “older than Cudjoe, about 200 miles up state on the Tombig[b]ee river”. Hurston did not write further about Redoshi, but she included the name “Sally Smith” and biographical details in an appendix of her manuscript for what was posthumously published as Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-tales from the Gulf States (2001). It was based on the manuscript and notes of about 500 of her interviews. Hurston did not refer to Redoshi in Barracoon, which concentrated on Kossola and his experiences.
Redoshi, referred to as “Aunt Sally Smith”, was interviewed in 1932 by the Montgomery Advertiser, when she was living on a plantation then owned by the Quarles family. The article reported that she was 25 when she was captured, that she was a “princess” from the tribe of the Tarkars, and that she came from the same village in present-day Benin as Kossola/Cudjo Lewis. Durkin says this is “apparently the only newspaper article that is devoted to the experiences of a female Middle Passage survivor”. The account, she says, is mediated by the white journalist and “reflects its white interviewer’s romantic fantasies of the African continent” and “reinforces the customary pre-civil-rights era depictions of U.S. slavery as a benevolent, ‘civilising’ practice”.
Redoshi was filmed for a 1938 educational film, The Negro Farmer: Extension Work for Better Farming and Better Living, made by the United States Department of Agriculture with assistance from the Tuskegee Institute. The film was described as “a paternalistic portrait of black rural life”, intended to “halt a mass migration to the urban north by black people”. Smith appeared briefly in the film but did not have any spoken lines; she is the second survivor of the Clotilda and the only woman of the transatlantic slave trade to be filmed. The work is held by the Library of Congress.
In Documenting Racism: African Americans in US Department of Agriculture Documentaries, 1921–42, J. Emmett Winn describes the footage, saying that the silent portrait of “Aunt Sally Smith”, whose abbreviated biography is provided by a white narrator, underscores the poor living conditions of Southern farmers in the Black Belt. It is part of an effort to promote agricultural improvements guided by the USDA’s guidance and to emphasize the film’s message that “blacks should stay on Southern farms.”
Not to be critical, but, that last quote, that’s just a theory.