THE SURVIVORS OF THE CLOTILDA: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the American Slave Trade

For Black History Month, a look into American History, with author and historian Dr. Hannah Durkin. Her epic book is THE SURVIVORS OF THE CLOTILDA: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the American Slave Trade. Dr. Durkin is a historian specializing in transatlantic slavery and African diasporic art and culture, and is an advisor to the History Museum of Mobile, which is working to memorialize the Clotilda survivors.

Episode Transcript

(00:02):
Welcome to Get Connected with Nina delRio, a weekly conversation about fitness,
health and happenings in our community onone oh six point seven Light FM.
Good morning, and thanks for listening. To get connected. For a Black
History Month and for President's Day weekend, I'll look into American history with the
author and historian doctor Hannah Durkin.Her epic book is The Survivors of the

(00:26):
Clotilda, The Lost Stories of thelast Captives of the American slave Trade.
Doctor Hannah Durkin, thank you forbeing on the show. Thank you,
it's great to be here. DoctorDurkin is a historian specializing in Transatlantic slavery
and African diasporic art and culture.She holds a PhD in American Studies from
the University of Nottingham and a postgraduatediploma in journalism from Leeds Trinity University.

(00:50):
This is an epics story. Ithought we would kind of start maybe if
you could set the stage. Sothese were people who were able to be
kidnapped in Africa and brought to Alabamaover fifty years after the importation of captive
people had become a crime. Whatwas going on not only in the South
but the western coast of Africa.Yeah, so, as you say,

(01:12):
so, the United States bans itsslave trade in eighteen oh eight and it
declares it piracy in eighteen twenty,which means it's a capital crime, which
means you can be executed if yourcourt trying to traffic people across the Atlantic.
But an illegal slave trade continues.So what we have, it's mostly
centered on Cuba by the eighteen fifties, but it's mostly US built ships that

(01:37):
are trafficking people across the Atlantic.So the US is playing a major indirect
role in the Transatlantic slave trade atthis time. And what's going on in
West Africa. I mean, obviouslythis is a decade centuries of demographic breakdown
and social instability. But what youhave, and certainly what you have with
the Dahomy Empire, which is thelast sort of major at surviving independent empire

(02:02):
or that's major empire in the WestAfrica, in West Africa or this part
of West Africa in the nineteenth century, is a military state that has become
dependent on warfare rather than agriculture tosustain itself. So you have, unfortune,
a state that is involved in theTransatlantic slave trade to sustain its own

(02:23):
economy. So the king Glele ofd Homer, he actually talks about how
he can't stop this because if Istopped and make myself vulnerable. So it's
a horrible situation where greed and thesugar industry then trade in Cuba. But
what's also happening in the United Statesis that, of course there's a big

(02:44):
awareness that Cuba is participating in aslave trade, and there's a desire,
especially as it's so much cheaper toimport people from West Africa, only costing
about fifty two hundred dollars a personthat it is actually to buy people for
thousand dollars from the Upper South,so people in the lower cells. There's
quite a lot of support for reopeningthe slave trade. I'd like to go

(03:07):
back to something you were just sayingabout Africa. This area perhaps had a
military government, but there is,as you may be aware, in the
last couple of years, sort ofthese slurs that have been going around saying
maybe it wasn't so bad for Africans. They came to America and they learned
a trade. Can you talk alittle bit about what their their lives were,
And we know this from first tensurvivors descriptions. What were some of

(03:30):
the most notable things to you abouttheir lives. They always described their home
as a kind of endenic Eden,paradise. This is a space where they
are there hugely strong community networks,that land is extremely fertile. They have,
you know, a really great systemof law and order. They have

(03:50):
this really great society. And theseare really big societies as well. These
are cities, urban spaces that thebiggest, biggest, some of the larger
cities in the To States this time. These are wonderful, wonderful societies where
people where women trade, you know, they trade freely and have independent incomes
in a way that actually a lotof European or American women wouldn't have had

(04:12):
that kind of independence, economic independenceof this time. And so they have
great lives and they pine for theselives for the rest of the rest of
their lives. And of course theworld that they encounter in the United States
is hugely different and really exploitive anddefined by poverty and struggle. We're speaking
with doctor Hannah Durkin. She isthe advisor to the History Museum of Mobile,

(04:36):
which is working to memorialize the Clotildasurvivors and was a keynote speaker at
Africa Town's twenty twenty one Spirit ofOur Ancestors Festival, founded by the Clotilda
Descendants Association. Her book is TheSurvivors of the Clotilda, The Lost Stories
of the last captives of the Americanslave Trade. You're listening to get connected
on one six point seven led FM. I mean a del rio. I'm

(04:58):
going to jump way ahead for amoment. A lot of us became familiar
with the Clotilda story in the lastfour or five years because the scuttled wreck
of that ship was confirmed as officiallyfound along the Mobile River, found in
water that was just eight or tenfeet deep. Perhaps it was an open
secret that people knew where it was. What does that say to you that
this story kind of remained buried tosome large degree, at least in the

(05:21):
official public record until just the lastfew years. I mean, it tells
us about how well this crime washidden. In one sense, it tells
us that that many of the Catildasurvivors themselves don't appear to have known the
name of the ship the traffic themacross the Atlantic. So this was,
in one sense a secret or whichof course, meant that they were easy

(05:43):
to conceal. So many of themwere identified as Wanderer survivors. And the
Wanderer was the penultimate us A shipwhich docks off Jeckel Island, Georgia,
about nineteen months before the Catilda voyage, and that that was a crime that
was brought to no one was everan always ever punish, But that was
a well known voyage. But ofcourse it's an open secret in Alabama.

(06:06):
And what's so striking is that Ifound in a recently digitized newspaper a photograph
of what was purported in about nineteenthirty to be at the Clotilda's anchor,
and it wasn't, you know.I double checked with the chief archaeologist of
the Catilda and he said, that'stoo big to be. But even though

(06:26):
it wasn't, it tells us thateverybody knows about this voyage. Everybody knows
that people at that time were stillalive who survived this journey. So yeah,
it maybe intimates that there's a certainkind of local pride quite horribly that
this was something that they defeated theUS government and my smuggle children and they

(06:46):
were children into the United States.One of the beautiful things about this book
is, of course you have oryou found the names of age and ages
of most of these people. Thereare first hand accounts of their lives before
we go to meet them. Ina sense, can you talk about the
work and research you did to findout who they even were? Yes,

(07:09):
So, as I mentioned before,it was a struggle to identify them as
Clotilda survivors because they were very rarelynamed as Clotilda survivors with a community,
and Mobile was well known about becausethey established their own town north of Mobile.
But I basically because I encountered thename of one survivor and then when

(07:29):
I published work on her, Ifound as the word I encountered another survivor
after that from I was trying totell that their stories and I realized that
and then I basically kept searching tosee if they could find more people.
But it was mostly a case oflooking for people listed at Africa born on
the US Census and work out wherethey were living in relation to other people,

(07:50):
looking for newspaper accounts with sometimes withpurported wondrous survivors, and then trying
to you know, finding the evidenceto see if well were they Wonder survivor.
There was a work where they Clotildasurvivors, so lots of fragments of
information, but really a case ofpiecing them together and benefiting from the digitization
of newspapers and genealogical records as well. Let's talk about one of those survivors,

(08:16):
Dinah, who recalled being so smallthat she was the last one to
be purchased at market and just fora dime. Whether that's correct or not,
we don't know. But what wereher first days like? Yes,
so Dinah recalled being held at mcbillBay first of all, in Mbile,
first of all, and then beingsent to Wilcox County, and she recalled

(08:39):
she was about thirteen years old atthe time. She was separated from her
mother and brother who also survived thevoyage with her, and sent into a
cabin with four grown men. AndI guess I don't really need to say
more about what happened to her,but he soon became pregnant. So there
is evidence that a number of theClytilda survivors, often very young girls,

(09:01):
were paired, sometimes with other Clotildasuppliers. They're obviously expected or compelled force
to have to become pregnant have children. It's also not only you know,
there's torture that comes later. ButI think it's hard to comprehend what it
was like for the people on thecrossing because they had no idea where they

(09:22):
were. None of them had beenon the open ocean, or few of
them, I guess had been onthe open ocean. There's a mental torture
of being afraid they were going tobe eaten because they didn't know are these
cannibals? They don't know who thesewhite people are. Can you also talk
about the physical conditions on the slaveships? Yeah? Really unimagining You're horrible.
So this voyage takes about forty fivedays, that's a month and a

(09:43):
half. And they are, asfar as archaeologists can tell, forced to
lie in these tiny planks, sothat at least one historical document suggests that
actually they had room to stand up, but the archaeological evidence suggests otherwise.
So these are space because even thoughthey're children, in many cases of less
than six feet, you know,this is a tiny pact. Pacts hold

(10:07):
and they are The boys and menare almost certainly chained. It's not clear
if the girls are they're not allowedout at the hold for the first thirteen
days, and there's a note inthe Mobile Public Library. It's anonymous,
but it states that sixteen year oldgirl died two days into the voyage.
They're allowed hardly any water, thatwater twice a day and buried food.

(10:30):
And there's evidence that other Catilda captivesdied on this voice as well. These
Africans, they're fellow enslaved people arefree technically when Lee surrenders to Grant.
The Civil War ends April ninth,eighteen sixty five. As of the tenth,
they find out they're free in thisportion of Alabama. What happens next,

(10:54):
So for those who are held inthe being or, first of all,
they're having to work for their formerand slavers. They manage eventually to
save enough money to buy their ownland and establish the township, which they
named African Town, and they appointtheir own leader and judges, and they
build their own school and a churchand eventually their own graveyard those who die.

(11:16):
For those who are trapped in thecotton belt of central Alabama, appears
to have been very little change intheir material conditions, so they were forced
to labor in the cotton fields,and some are going to still laboring the
coon fields right at the end oftheir lives. And including those who live
into the nineteen thirties and in nineteenfood, what were their relations like with

(11:39):
you know, just having arrived inAmerica from Africa with enslaved people who had
been here for generations. So theyreally struggled because obviously they struggled to communicate
because they cannot speak English and thepeople they meet cannot speak euro of Us,
so they cannot understand each of the'slanguages. But unfortunately, those there's

(12:00):
racist ideas about African societies have beeninternalized by the African American communities, so
they called them, you know,savages and heathens, and they're quickly they
attempt to practice their religious and culturalpractices, but they're made to feel such
shame for doing so that they stop. I mean, they find ways to
hold on to those cultures and traditions, but they convert to Christianity quite quickly

(12:24):
to really kind of you know,to try and fit in and assimilate,
if you like, into their society. One of the lovely things I think
about this book is that it's notjust a bit of history that sort of
encapsulated and ends when these people passon, some of the survivors went on
to influence pivotal events that go rightup to modern day civil rights history.

(12:48):
Absolutely, and that's certainly a casewith more than one of the survivors.
So in Montgomery, a woman namedbou Jamoor, who was a grown woman,
so one of the few adults onthis voyage, and she actually had
three small children, including a baby, who were left behind on the West
Afric of the coast. And shelives for another seventy years, and of

(13:09):
course she never sees those children again. So she's determined to live the life
of a traditional European tradeswoman in Montgomery. She trades in Montgomery until she's physically
unable to do so, so tradestwice a week until nineteen twenty five.
And she is traveling, so she'straveling on the segregated trains, so she's
witnessing, you know, the emergenceof DJR segregation and also the fight against

(13:31):
that when it emerges in Montgomery,because there is an ascid campaign against it.
But she is trading along Dexter Avenue, which is where Rosa Parks refused
to get on a bus. Youknow vacate a seat to a white man,
which triggers the Montgomery bus boycott,and Bouga Moore is also people also
almost suddenly knew Ed Nixon, wholed the Montgomery bus boycott before Dr Martin

(13:56):
Luther King Junior took over. Anothercultld of survivor, Como lives in the
heart of Montgomery, just opposite theDexter Parsonage, which is where the Kings
lived during the busboy Cottons and overin Selma Brudos or Sally Smith to give
her her American name Ridoch. Shebefriended Amedia Boynton Robertson, who led was

(14:18):
a huge part of this thirty yearvoting whites campaign in Selma and Amedia Boyntant
Robinson calls Ridough. She describes herencounters with Rido. She is among her
richest experiences in the nineteen thirty sothose are hope for words. She's inspired
by her. But Matilda McCrea,who is the last survivor who was trafficked
as a two year old with hermother and three sisters. She marches to

(14:39):
Dallas County Courthouse. She marches aboutfifteen miles from her home her rural Dallas
County home to Dallas County Courthouse inDecember nineteen thirty one to demand reparations,
and of course she's dismissed by thewhite judge. But Dallas County Courthouse is
where Selma Voting Whites campaign is gatherjust over thirty years e the start of

(15:00):
the some were voting rights campaign andtheir campaign. Of course, you know
these are bloody Sunday these to thesum were voting you know, Selma to
Montgomery marches and it leads to thepassage of the voting rights in nineteen sixty
five. So there are lots ofhuge connections between the Clotilda survivors and the
civil rights It's an epic story anda beautiful book, The Survivors of the
Clotilda, The Lost Stories of thelast captives of the American slave Trade.

(15:26):
Doctor Hannah Didurkin has been our guest. Thank you for being on to Get
Connected. Thank you so much forhaving me. This has been Get Connected
with Nina del Rio on one ohsix point seven Light FM. The views
and opinions of our guests do notnecessarily reflect the views of the station.
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(15:48):
Thanks for listening.