page_title: Africatown
section_title: Post-Civil War to World War II
hierarchical_section_title: Africatown / History / Post-Civil War to World War II
caption_attribution_description: English: Historic Union Missionary Baptist Church, c. 1869 (originally Old Landmark Baptist church &amp; evolved from Stone Street Baptist Church) in Africatown, Mobile, Alabama. This church was co-founded by Cudjoe Lewis, the penultimate survivor of America's last slaveship, The Clotilde. This site is on the African-American Heritage Trail of Mobile.
context_page_description: Africatown, also known as AfricaTown USA and Plateau, is a historic community located three miles north of downtown Mobile, Alabama. It was formed by a group of 32 West Africans, who in 1860 were included in the last known illegal shipment of slaves to the United States. The Atlantic slave trade had been banned since 1808, but 110 enslaved people held by the Kingdom of Dahomey were smuggled into Mobile on the Clotilda, which was burned and scuttled to try to conceal its illicit cargo. More than 30 of these people, believed to be ethnic Yoruba and Fon, founded and created their own community in what became Africatown. They retained their West African customs and language into the 1950s, while their children and some elders also learned English. Cudjo Kazoola Lewis, a founder of Africatown, lived until 1935 and was long thought to be the last survivor of the slaves from the Clotilda.
  In 2019, scholar Hannah Durkin from Newcastle University documented Redoshi, a West African woman who was believed at the time to be the last survivor of slaves from the Clotilda. Also known as Sally Smith, she lived to 1937. She had been sold to a planter who lived in Dallas County, Alabama.
context_section_description: Meaher initially used 32 of the enslaved Africans as workers on his plantation. After the Civil War (1861–1865) they were emancipated, but they continued to work Meaher's property in the delta north of Mobile on the west side of the river. The formerly enslaved people founded a community known as Africatown, bounded on three sides by water: a bayou, Three Mile Creek (formerly Chickasabogag Creek), and the Mobile River.
  Among the founders of Africatown was a man named Cudjoe Kazoola Lewis (his Yoruba name was Kazoola or Kossola). He was said to be the oldest slave on the Clotilda and a chief. Accounts also refer to Charlie Poteet as a chief. Their medicine man was named Jabez, or Jaba. Charles Lewis (Oluale was his Yoruba name) and his future wife Maggie were also among the Africans on the Clotilda. Cudjoe Lewis lived until 1935 and until 2019 was thought to be the last survivor of the original group. He was a spokesman for the community and was interviewed by early 20th-century writers Emma Langdon Roche and Zora Neale Hurston, among others, who both relied on his accounts for the history of the capture, voyage and community.
  In the post-Civil War and emancipation period, the people in Africatown were joined by people from the same ethnic groups who were living in the Mobile area. They gathered as a community to live independently and evade supervision by whites. The community had two major sections: the first and larger one, of about 50 acres, and a second section of about 7 acres, located about two miles west. The latter area was called Lewis Quarters after founder Charlie Oluale Lewis and his wife Maggie.
  Cudjo Lewis's son Joe (Joseph) learned to read and write at the church which the settlers founded in Africatown. He helped preserve the story of his father and the Clotilda, as did the families and later community schools, through oral histories. The women raised and sold crops, and the men worked in mills for $1 a day, saving money to purchase the land from Meaher. When possible, they avoided white people.
  They established the African Church, later known as the Old Landmark Church. In 1876, they opened the Old Plateau Cemetery, also known as the Africatown Graveyard. In the early 20th century, they replaced the old church with the brick Union Missionary Baptist Church, which is still in use.
  The community started its first public school in 1880; it is known as the Mobile County Technical School.
  Cudjoe Lewis helped his fellow Africans to adapt to their new country, although they had been badly treated by whites. For decades, he served as a spokesman for the people of Africatown. He was visited by American writers Emma Langdon Roche and Zora Neale Hurston, and educator Booker T. Washington, president of Tuskegee Institute. Roche published a book in 1914 about American slavery and the Africatown community. In 1927, Hurston interviewed Cudjo Lewis for the Journal of Negro History. Although she never published the article, she made a short film about him. She returned later and frequently visited Lewis over a period of three months. She wrote a book about this experience and Lewis's life but was unable to get it published. Her book  was posthumously published as Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo", in an annotated edition in May 2018.
  During interviews, Lewis would tell about the civil wars in West Africa, in which members of the losing side were sold into slavery to Africans and Europeans. His were Takpa people, who had lived in a village in the interior. Cudjo related how he and others from his village had been captured by warriors from neighboring Dahomey, taken to Ouidah and imprisoned within a large slave compound. They were sold by the King of Dahomey to Foster and transported to the U.S. on the Clotilda. After the Civil War and emancipation, the people asked the U.S. government to repatriate them to Africa, but they were refused.
  The community developed along the spine of Telegraph Road in the early 20th century, becoming known both as Plateau, for its high ground, and Magazine. Those areas became part
caption: Historic Union Missionary Baptist Church
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