#cudjo lewis

[tani-b-art]

PBS' Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space

[theknitpotato]

The last American slave ship docked illegally in Mobile, Alabama in 1860, carrying about 160 West African captives. Among them was Cudjo Lewis, who recognized how his birth culture might be erased while toiling in this new land.

So when he was freed, he purchased two acres and started a self-sufficient community of survivors of the last slave ship. Known to outsiders as Africatown, Lewis' neighborhood was modeled on his West African home, where extended families lived together, members conversed in their regional languages, and partook in traditions that might otherwise be lost to them in America. Today, Africatown still exists and houses the descendants of the nation's last slave ship community.

Learn more about Cudjo Lewis and his journey to founding an African legacy in America

[ausetkmt]

Last Slave Ship Survivor Gave Interview in the 1930s

Last Slave Ship Survivor Mr Cudjo Lewis Gave this Interview in the 1930s. Today we can listen to That proof of the last voyage on the Clotilda, which has Surfaced Almost 90 Years Later

[madamemarmot]

Watermelon, like too many other gorgeous things in life, is much too fleeting. 🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉 Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" by Zora Neale Hurston

[peachyblkdemonslayer]

BHM Fact #26

[cartermagazine]

Today We Honor Oluale Kossola, Renamed Cudjo Lewis

Zora Neale Hurston tells the story of Cudjo Lewis, who was born Oluale Kossola in what is now the West African country of Benin in her book “Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo.”

A member of the Yoruba people, he was only 19 years old when members of the neighboring Dahomian tribe invaded his village, captured him along with others, and marched them to the coast.

There, he and about 120 others were sold into slavery, after the “Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves" took effect in 1808 slavery was abolished, and crammed onto the Clotilda, the “last” slave ship to reach the continental United States.

The Clotilda brought its captives to Alabama in 1860, just a year before the outbreak of the Civil War. Even though slavery was legal at that time in the U.S., the international slave trade was not, and hadn’t been for over 50 years. Along with many European nations, the U.S. had outlawed the practice in 1808.

After being abducted from his home, Lewis was forced onto a ship with strangers. The abductees spent several months together during the treacherous passage to the United States, but were then separated in Alabama to go to different owners.

“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. “Everybody lookee at us strange. We want to talk wid de udder colored folkses but dey doan know whut we say.”

Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered in April 1865, Lewis says that a group of Union soldiers stopped by a boat on which he and other enslaved people were working and told them they were free.

He and a group of 31 other freepeople saved up money to buy land near Mobile, which they called Africatown.

CARTER™️ Magazine

[beardedmrbean]

Hey you can answer this tomorrow, but why women king was made…remember roots? I heard the og mc kunta kenta (Is that a real fucking African name?) didn’t understand what the Europeans was doing on the ports with slaves…even though he would have actually known-ooooh

But as you know that left a (bad) impact onto my community….but I keep realize one huge issue Africans have with my community is we try to keep the sanitize version of the slave trade we were taught even as middle age adults

Expect meee, god this pan Africa hurt us

Also people tried to compare women king to 300 and braveheart…haven’t seen braveheartt…but 300 was meant to be a glorified retelling of the battle of themployae

Women king have to twisted the entire course of history to write it

Roots managed to serve its purpose, at least the original one, suffered from extreme historical inaccuracies in places never saw the remake.

But as you know that left a (bad) impact onto my community….but I keep realize one huge issue Africans have with my community is we try to keep the sanitize version of the slave trade we were taught even as middle age adults

This is Oluale Kossola, his American name is Cudjoe Kazoola Lewis (he chose all but Lewis himself), he's the last known slave with distinct memories of life in Africa before being sold by the dahomey and put on a ship and smuggled into the US, human cargo was illegal by then but greedy and evil people on both sides of the Atlantic kept on doing it anyhow.

You can do some of your own reading if you like, but some highlights from his wiki page are.

In April or May 1860, his village was attacked and Lewis was taken prisoner by female warriors led by King Glele of Dahomey, during an annual dry-season raid for slaves. Along with other captives, he was taken to the slaving port of Ouidah and sold to Captain William Foster of the Clotilda, an American ship recently built in Mobile, Alabama, and owned by businessman Timothy Meaher. The importation of slaves into the United States had been illegal since 1808, but slaves were still routinely smuggled in from Spanish Cuba.

And this is from a article about a book about him

The pathos of the African American experience, told with such tenderness in Barracoon, is matched by its complexity. Hurston herself remarked that in writing Kossola’s harrowing account of how the king of Dahomey profited from raiding and selling members of neighbouring kingdoms, she was deeply affected by the question of African complicity in the slave trade. “The inescapable fact that stuck in my craw,” Hurston wrote, “was my people had sold me and the white people had bought me. That did away with the folklore I had been brought up on – that white people had gone to Africa, waved a red handkerchief at the Africans and lured them aboard ship and sailed away.”

One hell of a reality check right there

Also people tried to compare women king to 300 and braveheart…haven’t seen braveheartt…but 300 was meant to be a glorified retelling of the battle of themployae

ya if they wanted to do a Braveheart comparison they'd need to set it up so that the areas that the dahomey raided set up to fight againt the dahomey

Women king have to twisted the entire course of history to write it

Based on historical events, but we're not going to tell you that we did a 180 on who was doing what.

Could you imagine the fallout if someone made a accurate movie about that, painting all the perpetrators as what they were.

Wonder if finding out that if their ancestors hadn't been forced onto a boat there's a good chance they would have either been worked until they died or used as a human sacrifice might shift some viewpoints a little.

None of that is me expressing anything other than just curiosity, since this is tumblr and we piss on the poor who just want to read here I figure disclaimer is needed.

[transgenderer]

The schooner Clotilda (often misspelled Clotilde) was the last known U.S. slave ship to bring captives from Africa to the United States, arriving at Mobile Bay, in autumn 1859[1] or on July 9, 1860,[2][3] with 110 African men, women, and children.[4]

U.S. involvement in the Atlantic slave trade had been banned by Congress through the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves enacted on March 2, 1807 (effective January 1, 1808), but the practice continued illegally, especially through slave traders based in New York in the 1850s and early 1860. After the voyage, the ship was burned and scuttled in Mobile Bay in an attempt to destroy the evidence.

A spokesman for the community, Cudjo Lewis, lived until 1935 and was one of the last survivors from the Clotilda. Redoshi, another captive on the Clotilda, was sold to a planter in Dallas County, Alabama, where she became known also as Sally Smith. She married, had a daughter, and lived until 1937 in Bogue Chitto. She was long thought to have been the last survivor of the Clotilda.[5] Research published in 2020 indicated that another survivor, Matilda McCrear, lived until 1940.[6]

(the last living former slave in the US seems somewhat hard to verify, but anna j cooper is very well documented and lived to 1964! she was president of a university until age 82!)

[blueiight]

I love the brunt of zora neale hurston’s work but she so wrong for lying about the dahomey & lying on cudjoe lewis like dat .

and idk how much of it is hurston& moreso the presumption ppl have made about barracoon being some sort of history… bc it was published at the time in new ebony mag as fictional. and theres this remark on her work (which definitely maps onto barracoon’s prose.. passages about heathens and all)

[tostudyadragonfly]

Yesterday I watched the documentary Descendant (Netflix) and I won’t make a whole post (bc I need to sleep) but I think it’s one of those stories that need to be heard. Thank God for Zora Neale Hurston for capturing so much of that story. In much of the film they read from Barracoon, and this tied the story of Cudjo Lewis, to his lineage, to the current struggle and work of Africatown in Alabama quite beautifully. It really made me want to know so much more about what else has been done since it’s release

[semper-legens]

26. Barracoon: The Story of the Last Slave, by Zora Neale Hurston

Owned: No, library Page count: 164 My summary: The story of one of the last survivors of the last slave ship that came to the Americas, as told to Zora Neale Hurston in the 1920s. My rating: 3.5/5 My commentary:

At work a couple of months ago, I did an author spotlight display focusing on Zora Neale Hurston. She's an interesting figure. A black American writer in the early parts of the 20th century, focused on collecting black American stories and folktales alongside some fiction writing. This is a work that went unpublished in her time, the stories collected by her from a man named Cudjoe Lewis, or Oluale Kossola, at the time thought to be the last survivor of the last slave ship that came to America, the Clotilda. It finally got a publisher in 2018, the manuscript having lain in Howard University all the while. So how was it? ...odd.

Let me explain. There is more preface and explanation in this book than actual text, at least in my version of it. The pages written by Hurston are actually relatively short, and give more of an overview than an in-depth discussion of Kossola's life. Which makes sense, don't get me wrong - I completely understand why Kossola wouldn't want to discuss the more traumatic things that happened to him, especially as Hurston was a relative stranger and needed to gain his trust before he would open up to her. Nevertheless, the story is more about Hurston visiting Kossola at times than Kossola's actual life and story, which was a little disappointing. One thing I have to praise, however, is that Kossola's words seem to be recorded as he would have spoken them; Hurston uses the vernacular for Kossola's dialogue, rather than transliterating his words into standard English, which is partially the reason this was not published in her lifetime. It's an admirable effort to preserve a piece of American history, but I'm afraid it made for some pretty light reading.

Next up, a question that can be answered in one word.

[izatrini]

Cudjoe-Lewis: Trinidad and Tobago athletes get most $$ support - TT Newsday

Cudjoe-Lewis: Trinidad and Tobago athletes get most $$ support  TT Newsday http://dlvr.it/TGQZKX

[whitesinhistory]

On July 8, 1860, more than 50 years after Congress banned the trafficking of enslaved Africans into the U.S., the ship Clotilda arrived in Mobile, Alabama, carrying more than 100 enslaved people from West Africa. Captain William Foster commanded the boat and was later said to be working for Timothy Meaher, a white Mobile shipyard owner who built the Clotilda.

Captain Foster evaded capture by federal authorities by transferring the enslaved Africans to a riverboat and burning and then sinking the Clotilda. The smuggled Africans were subsequently distributed as enslaved property amongst the group of white men who had financed the voyage. Mr. Meaher kept more than 30 of the Africans on Magazine Point, his property north of Mobile. One of those Africans was a man who came to be known as Cudjo Lewis.

In 1861, Mr. Meaher and his partners were prosecuted for illegally trafficking the Africans into the country, but a federal court dismissed the case as the Civil War began. No investigation or remedy ever involved the actual African men and women central to the case; while the federal case was pending, the Africans Mr. Meaher had claimed remained on his property left to fend for themselves and were offered no means of returning to Ghana.

In 1865, after the Civil War ended and slavery was widely abolished, the Clotilda survivors once held by Mr. Meaher were free—but still trapped in a foreign land far from their home. They settled along the outskirts of Mr. Meaher’s property, at a site that came to be known as “Africatown,” and developed a community modeled after the traditions and government they had been forced to leave behind. Unlike the vast majority of newly freed Black people in the country, who had either been born in the U.S. or seized from Africa many decades before, the people of Africatown had a direct, recent connection to their African roots and vivid memories of their culture, language, and customs. Well into the 1950s, descendants of the Clotilda passengers living in Africatown maintained a distinct language and unique community of survival.

Cudjo Lewis lived to be the last surviving Clotilda passenger in Africatown. In 1927, Black anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston traveled to Alabama to interview Mr. Lewis about his life and produced a manuscript documenting his story. The book was not published in her lifetime, but in 2018, the story was released as Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo. Today, many descendants of the Africans trafficked on the Clotilda continue to live in northern Mobile, and in December 2012, the National Park Service added the Africatown Historic District to the National Register of Historic Places.

[lboogie1906]

Cudjoe Kazoola Lewis (c. 1841 – July 17, 1935) born Oluale Kossola, and known as Cudjo Lewis, was the second to last known survivor of the Atlantic slave trade between Africa and the US. Together with 115 other African captives, he was brought illegally to the US on board the ship Clotilda in 1860. The captives were landed in the backwaters of the Mobile River near Mobile and were hidden from authorities. The ship was scuttled to evade discovery and was not found again until 2019.

After the Civil War and emancipation, he and other members of the Clotilda group became free. A number of them founded a community at Magazine Point, north of Mobile. They were joined there by others born in Africa. Now designated as the Africatown Historic District, the community was added to the National Register of Historic Places. He preserved the experiences of the Clotilda captives by providing accounts of the history of the group to visitors, including Mobile artist and author Emma Langdon Roche and author and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston.

Importation of enslaved persons into the US had been illegal since 1808, but slaves were still being smuggled in from Cuba. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence

[biggoldbelt]

Clotilda: The Return Home - Review (2024) | Disney+ and Hulu

Clotilda: The Return Home review by Big Gold Belt Media –Synopsis:CLOTILDA: THE RETURN HOME chronicles the account of two survivors of the last American slave ship, Cudjo Lewis and Gumpa Lee, who dreamed of returning to their ancestral home over 150 years ago. Today, their descendants are fulfilling that dream and National Geographic Explorer Tara Roberts, whose work shines a light on the origin…