The Founding of Africatown
Once he won the bet, Timothy Meaher sold the slaves on the down-low, but kept many of them to work on his land. After slavery was abolished in 1865, he couldn’t care less what happened to the people he brought over. He was not about to spend the money to take them home, either. So he let them go. Many of them didn’t know how to speak English, and white people were not allowed to purchase new slaves anymore, they couldn’t exactly find a place to live or work.
Meaher allowed them to live on his property in the north end of Mobile, in a plot of dense forest known as Hog Bayou. As the name suggests, wild boars ran through the woods, as well as deer. The water was full of fish, and lush vegetation was all around them, as well. As members of African tribes, they still knew how to hunt and survive on their own. This area became known as “Africatown”, and it was the first all-black neighborhood in the United States.
The people who came over on the Clotilda did not spend very much time living as slaves, so they still spoke their native languages and very much held on to their cultural values. These former African slaves wanted to go back to their homeland, but their former owners refused to help fund the journey. In Africatown, they were able to govern themselves under tribal law. They became the first and only African-American community to do so.
The former slaves who were born in the United States and spoke English didn’t know how to survive in the wild on their own, and they didn’t have enough money to figure out a way to travel back to their native villages. When they found Africatown, they were accepted with open arms. They were taught how to hunt and fish.
Some of these people reached out to Timothy Meaher for work. He and his brother James owned a lumber mill, so they agreed to take on some of these former slaves as paid employees. With this money, they were able to buy private property and make themselves Africatown an official part of Mobile, Alabama. Unfortunately, white business owners would eventually take away the little piece of home that these people had built for themselves.
The last remaining person who was still living in Africatown who came over on the Clotilda was a man named Cudjoe Lewis. He gave an interview about the whole story of what happened to the slaves who were smuggled into Alabama in the 1930’s, but his testimony was buried in the town archives for decades. An author named Zora Neale Hurston found his story and wrote a book called Barracoon: The Story of The Last Black Cargo.
As the years went on, more and more factories were built around the bay. At first, people living in Africatown loved this, because it created more jobs. The town grew bigger with a grocery store, Elk’s Lodge, barber shops, motel, and movie theater. The only problem was the massive chemical refinery that opened up right next to the town, billowing putrid and toxic smoke over the homes of the people. According to residents, there were days when even stepping outside and breathing the air would make people sick and vomit.