October 18, 2019
Hello ,
Maybe you heard about the discovery of the Clotilda, the ship used in the highly profitable, totally illegal, business venture that became the last voyage hauling
enslaved Africans to America.
What you haven't seen are the full-color photos that starkly portray the remnants of that voyage, alive and kicking in present day. Would you believe, Mobile, Alabama hosts a segregated Mardi Gras celebration?
Would you believe organizers selected two courts of royalty for this year's event? One black and one white? And another year not so long ago, the white queen was a descendant of the slave trader, and the black queen a descendant of enslaved Africans he smuggled up the Mobile River.
In 1860, the transatlantic slave trade had been outlawed for fifty years. But Timothy Meaher, a prosperous shipbuilder and landowner in Mobile must have needed a thrill. Or maybe it was the power that excited him. The power of money, the power to hold other humans as slaves to do his bidding, the power to thumb his nose at Northern
Abolitionists.
Meaher made a bet with some Northern businessmen that he could smuggle a boatload of Africans into Mobile Bay without getting caught by the feds. He put a lot on the line. He wagered one thousand dollars, and if he were caught, he could be hanged. That was the penalty for smuggling human cargo.
The Clotilda would have been similar in size and rigging to the slave ship Amistad, shown above. But there are no images of the Clotilda.
Under cover of dark, she sailed up the Mobile River to 12 Mile Island and stealthily her cargo was taken ashore where the Africans were hidden in a swamp for several days.
The captain set the ship ablaze, burning her to the waterline to hide evidence of the 109 men, women and children and their two-month journey across the sea.
Meaher and his family kept 60 of Africans, and put the rest on the auction block.
Redoshi, shown left, was a child when the Clotilda set sail. On the voyage, she was forced to marry a stranger.
“I was 12 years old and he was a man from another tribe who had a family in Africa,” she is quoted as saying in a memoir by civil rights activist Amelia Boynton Robinson. “I couldn’t understand his talk and he couldn’t understand me. They put us on block together and sold us for man and wife.”
Redoshi was purchased by a man named Washington Smith, who changed her name to Sally Smith. She worked in Smith's house and fields for nearly five years as a slave, and stayed there with her daughter after Emancipation.
She died in 1937, the last known survivor of the Clotilda's crossing.
Cudjo Lewis was one of the Africans Meagher kept for himself, and sent to work unloading freight at a local dock.
Zora Neale Hurston interviewed Lewis about being stolen away from his home in Africa, and wrote down his words in the dialect he spoke them.
“We very sorry to be parted from one ’nother,” Lewis told Hurston. “We seventy days cross de water from de Affica soil, and now dey part us from one ’nother. Derefore we cry. Our grief so heavy look lak we cain stand it. I think maybe I die in my sleep when I dream about my mama.”
“We doan know why we be bring ’way from our country to work lak dis,” he told Hurston.
Above: Cudjo Lewis later in life at his home. Courtesy Erik Overbey Collection, The Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of South Alabama.
Once the slaves were freed, Lewis and the others wanted to be taken back to Africa, but neither Meaher or the government would help them.
Despite losing his free labor, Meager remained a wealthy property owner and continued to until his death. (Photo shows Timothy Meaher's grave site.)
Meager refused to give his former slaves land, so Lewis and others continued to work his plantation, saving their meager wages.
Eventually, Lewis and thirty-some others from the Clotilda bought small plots of land from Meager and established a village a few miles north of Mobile they called Africatown.
While Meaher's son Augustine became a multi-millionaire, they they made a simple life, growing their own food and building shelter. They spoke their native tongue, wore native clothing, practiced their traditional culture and avoided whites as much as possible.
Decades later they still performed menial labor and remained poor. Many of their descendants today hold working-class jobs. (Photo shows recent photo of Africatown Cemetery.)
A street cutting through the distressed neighborhood of Africatown today, is named Meaher Avenue, and a family owned real estate company owns a good chunk of land there. Nearby, is a popular state park named after Meaher. Tax records show his
descendants are worth millions and still mingle in Mobile's high society.
The coming-out party for the daughters of Mobile’s upper crust families coincides with the annual Mardi Gras celebration of the all-white Mobile Carnival Association, an organization dating back to the time of the Clotida's voyage across the middle passage.
The announcement of the Mobile carnival's white queen remains the social event of the season. The lucky young lady Helen Meaher, crowned in 2007 is pictured on the left.
A distant granddaughter of Timothy Meaher and her all-white court reigned over a series of festivities including the extravagant, limited-invitation Mardi Gras Ball.
At the same time, an all-black court selected by the black Mobile Area Mardi Gras Association led similar celebratory events.
And it just so happened that the black queen, Stephannie Lucas, was a descendent of one of the kidnapped Africans Meaher shipped to Alabama in the Clotilda.
She and the young man crowned king both taught elementary school in a Mobile neighborhood with an 80-percent poverty rate.
featured the city's 2007 Mardi Gras preparations and celebrations, capturing this dichotomy. For the first time ever, the segregated royal courts attended each other balls.
But change comes slowly, if at all, in a town where one of the most recent lynching in the United States happened in 1981. Several Ku Klux Klan members beat and killed Michael Donald, a 19-year-old African-American, and hung his body from a
tree.
“I know that there’s a time and there’s a place for change, and I’m not trying to shun that. But I don’t think anything needs to be forced on it right now. It’s worked well for years, for a hundred years…. In my opinion, nothing needs to change," said Max Bruckmann, Mobile Carnival Association Mardi Gras King 2007 says in the documentary.
"I don't think there's a problem at all," said Everage Thomas, president of the historically black Mobile Area Mardi Gras Association.
Margaret Director of Order of Myths says, "I am not sure that the black Mobile Area Mardi Gras Association (MAMGA) and the white Mobile Carnival Association (MCA) will ever merge, but I think that the more people from these two communities spend time together, the more that anything is possible. There is a lot of curiosity on both sides about what the other side is all about. In addition to race, I think there are a lot of class issues involved that make it
even more complicated."
The 2019 queens of Mobile's segregated Mardi Gras festivities are both college track stars who competed against each other in high school running events.
(Left, Katherine White, right, Ebie Douglas)
Meanwhile, Mardi Gras parades and parties are a huge tourist attraction for Mobile, bringing a quarter of a billion dollars into the local economy.
The recent discovery and identification of the Clotilda provides evidence that could be used in an effort to provide reparations to blacks descended from enslaved people.
“Many of our white brothers and sisters…think we talk about reparations, that we are going to hand them a bill. That they are going to have to give us some money," says Dr. Cain Hope Felder, a Professor at Howard University. "We don’t want any money! It’s not about money for the sacrifices….. It’s about the other kind of currency—a change of the heart, not the change of the pocket.”
Looks like it will indeed require a huge change of heart to end royal segregation in Mobile, Alabama. And a little change of the pocket wouldn't be a bad thing.
Sources:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/2019/05/clotilda-the-last-american-slave-ship-found-in-alabama/
https://www.al.com/news/mobile/2015/02/is_mobile_mardi_gras_segregate.html
https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/orderofmyths/film.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/slave-ship-alabama-africatown.html
https://www.ncl.ac.uk/press/articles/latest/2019/04/slave/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/us/transatlantic-slave-trade-last-survivor.html
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