Africatown (also spelled AfricaTown and African Town) is a small Mobile neighborhood established by many of the people who arrived on the Clotilda, the last documented slave ship to reach the United States. Co-founder Cudjo Lewis achieved notoriety when he was interviewed about his experiences in Africa, his journey to Mobile on the ship, and his life after he regained his freedom. The Africatown settlement (formerly called African Town) is located north of the city on a hill by the Alabama River in the area known as Plateau and Magazine Point.


The residents appointed Gumpa, a Fon relative of King Ghezo known as Peter Lee or African Peter, as their chief. They also established a judicial system for the town based on their own laws, which were administered by two judges, Jaba Shade—well versed in herbal medicine—and Ossa Keeby. They also built the first school in the area to provide their children with better opportunities. Their school teacher was a young African American woman.
Although the residents of African Town owned land, had become U.S. citizens in 1868, and enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy, they never ceased to long for their families and homelands back in Africa. They became aware of subsidized passage to the West African nation of Liberia (established by prominent U.S. political leaders and others for the purpose of creating a homeland for Free Blacks) through the American Colonization Society (founded in 1816 to send Free Blacks to Liberia) and requested passage in 1870. Their appeal was unsuccessful, however, and they remained in African Town. In 1869, the residents, who thus far had continued to practice their traditional religions, largely converted to Christianity. They built the first church in the neighborhood, Old Landmark Baptist Church, in 1872 (it was rebuilt in bricks in the early twentieth century) and opened a graveyard in 1876. Over time, several couples, including Cudjo and Abile Lewis, and Ossa and Annie Keeby, bought additional land, and the settlement expanded.
Beginning at the time when they were enslaved, some of the young Africans had intermarried with African Americans, but there had also been tensions from the first days on the plantations between the two groups. The Africans complained that some of their neighbors ridiculed and shunned them. The African shipmates were a very tight-knit community who, even in servitude, remained defiant to whomever threatened or disparaged them, whether white or black. These tensions with some Americans continued after emancipation and in part explain why the Africans felt the need to establish their own settlement, church, school, and graveyard.
By the 1880s, African Town was home to a second generation that had never been to Africa but had been told repeatedly by their parents that it was a land of abundance and beauty. Many of the youngsters had both an American and a West African name, knew the geography of their parents' homelands, and, among those who had two African parents, also spoke their indigenous languages. Many of these second-generation residents lived into the 1950s, and thus some African Americans whose origin was in the international slave trade spoke African languages well into the twentieth century.

Their descendants now number in the thousands and carry with them their ancestors' legacy of pride and distinctiveness, attachment to Africa, and sense of place through their belonging to a small town that has no equivalent in this country. The descendants of the founders of African Town are unique among African Americans in that they know who their African ancestors were, what their names were, where they came from, and for some of them, what they looked like. Some still live in the settlement that is now called Africatown. The log cabins built by their ancestors no longer exist and have been replaced by modern houses; but the trees and bushes planted by the men and women of the Clotilda are still there, as are their graves.
Additional Resources
Diouf, Sylviane Anna. Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Additional Resources
Diouf, Sylviane Anna. Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Barracoon. Unpublished typescripts and hand-written draft, 1931. Alain Locke Collection, Manuscript Department, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
Roche, Emma Langdon. Historic Sketches of the South. New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1914.