In August 2010, the anthropology Professor Neil Norman from the College of William & Mary has excavated sites in Plateau, in north Mobile County, looking for remnants of the daily life of the Africans who arrived in Mobile in 1860 as captives on the slave ship Clotilda.
Norman’s personal interest deepened after working in Benin, in west Africa.
In Plateau, on the homesites of the Clotilda's descendants, were architectural elements that he had just begun to uncover.
Norman and his team have also worked identifying and mapping the graves of the old Plateau Cemetery.
Keri Coumanis, assistant director of the Mobile Historic Development Commission, administered the grant from the Alabama Historical Commission that, in part, financed the dig. Other funds came from the city of Mobile and Mobile County, which gave principal support to the cemetery work. The Museum of Mobile was also involved, she said.
The story of Africatown began when 110 African men, women and children were brought as captives from Dahomey, on the coast of west Africa, to Mobile in 1860. The trip was financed by Timothy Meaher, a Mobile shipyard owner in business with his brothers Burns and James Meaher. Timothy Meaher had commissioned the voyage to buy the Africans, despite a federal ban on importing slaves. The Clotilda's arrival marked the last known instance of captured Africans being brought to the United States.
The award-winning, 2007 book by Sylviane Diouf, "Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America" (Oxford University Press) adds to the story.
Norman’s digs focused on the homesites of three of those former slaves: Peter Lee, Charlie Lewis and Cudjo "Kazoola" Lewis.
See http://blog.al.com/live/2010/08/story_of_survivors_of_americas.html
article edited by Angela Allison
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