This week on True Stories we talk with Dr. Hannah Durkin, author of The Survivors of the Clotilda: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the American Slave Trade.
The Clotilda, the last slave ship to land on American soil, docked in Mobile Bay, Alabama, in July 1860 - more than half a century after the passage of a federal law banning the importation of captive Africans, and 9 months before the beginning of the Civil War. The last of its survivors lived well into the 20th century. They were the last witnesses.
In the book, Dr. Hannah Durkin tells the stories of the Clotilda’s 110 captives, drawing on her intensive archival, historical, and sociological research. Durkin tells the story of the passage of their lives from their kidnappings in what is modern-day Nigeria through a terrifying 45-day journey across the Middle Passage. Durkin aslso tells the story of the subsequent sale of the ship’s 103 surviving children and young people into slavery across Alabama to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement in Selma.
Durkin also delves into the foundation of an all-Black African Town (later Africatown) in Northern Mobile. Africatown was an inspiration for writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including Zora Neale Hurston. It was also the foundation of the quilting community of Gee’s Bend, which was a Black artistic circle whose cultural influence remains enormous.
Dr. Hannah Durkin is a historian specializing in transatlantic slavery and African diasporic art and culture. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Nottingham and a Postgraduate Diploma in Journalism from Leeds Trinity University. She has taught at Nottingham and Newcastle universities, and recently served as a Guest Researcher at Linnaeus University in Sweden. She is an advisor to the History Museum of Mobile, which is working to memorialize the Clotilda survivors, and was the keynote speaker at Africatown’s 2021 Spirit of Our Ancestors Festival founded by the Clotilda Descendants Association. She is the recipient of more than a dozen academic prizes, including a prestigious Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship. She lives in the southeast of England.
