Overview

In the summer of 1860, more than fifty years after the United States legally abolished the international slave trade, 110 men, women, and children from Benin and Nigeria were brought ashore in Alabama under cover of night. They were the last recorded group of Africans deported to the United States as slaves. Timothy Meaher, an established Mobile businessman, sent the slave ship, the Clotilda, to Africa, on a bet that he could bring a shipful of niggers right into Mobile Bay under the officers' noses. He won the bet. This book reconstructs the lives of the people in West Africa, recounts their capture and passage in the slave pen in Ouidah, and describes their experience of slavery alongside American-born enslaved men and women. After emancipation, the group reunited from various plantations, bought land, and founded their own settlement, known as African Town. They ruled it according to customary African laws, spoke their own regional language and, when giving interviews, insisted that writers use their African names so that their families would know that they were still alive. The last survivor of the Clotilda died in 1935, but African Town is still home to a community of Clotilda descendants. The original publication of Dreams of Africa in Alabama marked the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.

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Allyson Johnson is an actress and singer who began performing at age twelve as coanchor of Bubble Gum Digest, for which she won an Emmy. After earning a degree in psychology from Brown University, she moved to New York where she became a social worker before shifting to a career in television and radio. Johnson has recorded countless commercials, promos, audiobooks, narrations, and animation series. Sylviane A. Diouf is an award-winning historian of the African Diaspora. She is the author of Slavery's Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons and Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas-named Choice Outstanding Academic Book in 1999. Her book Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America received the 2007 Wesley-Logan Prize of the American Historical Association, the 2009 Sulzby Award of the Alabama Historical Association and was a finalist for the 2008 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. She is the editor of Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies and the coeditor of In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience. A recipient of the Rosa Parks Award, the Dr. Betty Shabazz Achievement Award, and the Pen and Brush Achievement Award, Diouf is a Curator at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library.

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