The extraordinary story of the last survivors of the American slave trade, told for the first time
In July 1860, 52 years after a federal law banning the importation of slaves to the country and on the eve of the American Civil War, a slave ship docked in Mobile Bay, Alabama. Concealed in its hold were 108 surviving captives from West Africa, who had been kidnapped from their homes and transported in appalling conditions across the Atlantic. The Clotilda would be the last slave ship to land on US soil and thus serve as the final act of a terrible, hugely significant period in world history.
In this extraordinary and enormously poignant work of historical scholarship, Hannah Durkin tells the story of these survivors from the perspective of those enslaved. And their stories are remarkable, conveying over the course of a single lifetime the horrors of African kidnap, the Middle Passage, enslavement in the U.S. South, freedom, segregation, and even the activist beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement. These men and women would help to shape the United States creatively, spiritually, and politically. Many traces of their presence can still be found throughout Alabama, and their legacy, and their descendants, remain across the United States.
This is the story of America’s last enslaved, told for the first time.
- ISBN13 9780008446512
- Publish Date 18 January 2024 (first published 19 September 2023)
- Publish Status Forthcoming
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher HarperCollins Publishers
- Imprint William Collins
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 336
- Language English
- URL http://harpercollins.co.uk