A shipwreck awash in Black history takes center stage in Alabama

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Some Exhibits to Come – One Hundred Years of Jim Crow

Bibliography – One Hundred Years Of Jim Crow

Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.

Freedom’s Heroes During Jim Crow: Flossie Bailey and the Deeters

Souvenir Portrait of the Lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp, August 7, 1930, by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler. Courtesy of the Indiana Hisorical Society.

An Iconic Lynching in the North

Claxton Dekle – Prosperous Farmer, Husband & Father of Two

Ancient manuscripts about mathematics and astronomy from Timbuktu, Mali

Some Exhibits to Come – African Peoples Before Captivity

Shackles for Adults & Children from the Henrietta Marie

Some Exhibits to Come – The Middle Passage

What I Saw Aboard a Slave Ship in 1829

Life After Hate: A Former White Power Leader Redeems Himself

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July 8, 2023

By Donna M. Ownes, NBC

“Clotilda: The Exhibition” opens at the Africatown Heritage House on July 8. (Tiffany Pogue)

On July 8, 1860, a schooner carrying 110 men, women and children stolen from Africa sailed into waters near Mobile Bay under the cover of night.

The Clotilda, the last documented slave ship to enter America, made its surreptitious voyage some five decades after the international slave trade was outlawed, amid one of the most pivotal periods in U.S. history. The following year, 1861, the Civil War would erupt over slavery.

Now, 163 years later, “Clotilda: The Exhibition” at the new Africatown Heritage House tells the stories of the people aboard that ship, conjuring their collective resilience and the ways they survived and thrived amid unfathomable challenges.

[…]

Through interpretive text panels, documents and artifacts, this landmark exhibition focuses on the survivors: from their individual West African beginnings to their enslavement, and eventual freedom and settlement of a 19th century community dubbed Africatown in Mobile.

Keep reading for more information.

Learn more about the kidnapping of African peoples.

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