Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, General Research and Reference Division

Emma Langdon Roche, Historic Sketches of the South (New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1914)

Cudjoe Lewis and Abache were among the last group of Africans forcibly transported to the United States. Originally from present-day Benin and Nigeria, 110 men, women, and children disembarked in Mobile, Alabama, from the Clotilda in 1860. After Emancipation, they asked in vain to be repatriated. Very attached to their traditions, they eventually founded their own town, Africatown, where they were visited by (among many others) Booker T. Washington and Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston. The last survivor, Cudjoe Lewis, died in 1935. The descendants of the Clotilda Africans still live in Africatown.