The Last Slave Ship to America and the Town Its Survivors Built
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 15 May 2026
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, more than 50 years after the United States outlawed the international slave trade, the schooner Clotilda illegally brought captive Africans to Mobile, Alabama in 1860. After emancipation, many of those survivors pooled their money, bought land, and founded Africatown. Nick Tabor, the author of Africatown, shares the remarkable story of the last slave ship to reach America, the people aboard it, and the resilient Alabama community they built from nothing.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:14.2 | This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, |
| 0:18.4 | the show where America is the star and the American people. The search for the Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. |
| 0:22.4 | To search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:31.4 | On July 17, 1935, a man named Cudjo Lewis died in Mobile, Alabama at the age of 95. |
| 0:39.1 | His death would further dwindle the number of remaining survivors of the Atlantic slave trade. |
| 0:44.8 | He had lived the majority of his life in a small part of Mobile called Africa Town, |
| 0:49.9 | a community that he and his former shipmates, as they were called, built from scratch. |
| 0:56.0 | But our story doesn't start there. |
| 0:58.2 | It starts at the assignment desk of journalist Nick DeBoer, |
| 1:01.9 | who was asked to track down and do a story on the descendants of those who lived in Africa town. |
| 1:08.4 | After some searching, he found a man named Gary and gave him a call. |
| 1:13.5 | Let's get into the story. |
| 1:19.1 | The first thing he said to me on the phone was, you don't need to be writing about the |
| 1:23.5 | descendants. You should be writing about the neighborhood. He was quite forceful about this. |
| 1:28.3 | Gary's comment was, it used to be this thriving community. |
| 1:33.3 | She said, when I grew up there in the 50s and 60s, there were good jobs. |
| 1:37.3 | Everybody had big families. |
| 1:39.3 | There was this thriving business district. |
| 1:42.3 | It was just a wonderful place to grow up. |
| 1:44.8 | He said, now it looks like a war zone. |
... |
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