Africatown by Nick Tabor

Africatown: America's Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created
Nick Tabor
384 pages
St. Martin's Press

From Goodreads: An evocative and epic story, Nick Tabor's Africatown charts the fraught history of America from those who were brought here as slaves but nevertheless established a home for themselves and their descendants, a community which often thrived despite persistent racism and environmental pollution.

In 1860, a ship called the Clotilda was smuggled through the Alabama Gulf Coast, carrying the last group of enslaved people ever brought to the U.S. from West Africa. Five years later, the shipmates were emancipated, but they had no way of getting back home. Instead they created their own community outside the city of Mobile, where they spoke Yoruba and appointed their own leaders, a story chronicled in Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon.

That community, Africatown, has endured to the present day, and many of the community residents are the shipmates’ direct descendants. After many decades of neglect and a Jim Crow legal system that targeted the area for industrialization, the community is struggling to survive. Many community members believe the pollution from the heavy industry surrounding their homes has caused a cancer epidemic among residents, and companies are eyeing even more land for development.

At the same time, after the discovery of the remains of the Clotilda in the riverbed nearby, a renewed effort is underway to create a living memorial to the community and the lives of the slaves who founded it.

The Clotilda is having a bit of a moment, I think (and rightly so). Last year Ben Raines released his book The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How the Clotilda Was Found, her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning, which became an NPR Best Book of 2022. In 2018 Zora Neale Hurston's work Baracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" was rereleased and this is where I picked up my research of the Clotilda in 2019. Previously, I had only read a few of the news articles that surfaced around the time the ship was found and reading the short Baracoon left me needing more... a lot more.

And here we have Africatown, the latest tome about the Clotilda to be published. For roughly the first half of the book, the author focuses on the history surround the Clotilda's journey to and from Africa and the slaves she picked up. If you have never read anything about the Clotilda before, this will provide a succinct depiction of its history, but I found the history presented in The Last Slave Ship much more engaging. 

Africatown has the unique perspective of showing the more recent history of the town through the lens of environmental racism. Along with Flint, this is perhaps one of the most glaring examples of racism in industrialization; factories contaminated the town for generations with pollution that affected the food its citizens ate and coated the town in ash that had to be regularly scrubbed from houses. The book also spends a great amount of time describing the citizens most recent history of fighting potential oil pipelines from running under their water source. Tank farms are also a large environmental concern in the area. This perspective has left me searching for more books on environmental racism, so Tabor did a great job piquing my interest to an aspect of Jim Crow I have yet to explore.

Finally, the end of Africatown discusses some miscellaneous topics that were very interesting to me, including the Meaher's descendants and their secrecy regarding anything to do with the Clotilda. Also discussed is the effort it would take to make Africatown a historical museum and removing blight. All in all, Africatown is an interesting book and I would definitely recommend it to anyone looking to learn more about this one of a kind community.  

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the advanced copy of this book. As always, opinions are my own.