The Briefing Room
General Category => Science, Technology and Knowledge => History => Topic started by: Sanguine on May 14, 2018, 02:20:45 am
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Roughly 60 years after the abolition of slavery, anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston made an incredible connection: She located the last surviving captive of the last slave ship to bring Africans to the United States.
Hurston, a known figure of the Harlem Renaissance who would later write the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, conducted interviews with the survivor but struggled to publish them as a book in the early 1930s. In fact, they are only now being released to the public in a book called Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo†that comes out on May 8, 2018.
Hurston’s book tells the story of Cudjo Lewis, who was born in what is now the West African country of Benin. Originally named Kossula, he was only 19 years old when members of the neighboring Dahomian tribe captured him and took him to the coast. There, he and about 120 others were sold into slavery and crammed onto the Clotilda, the last slave ship to reach the continental United States...
https://www.history.com/news/zora-neale-hurston-barracoon-slave-clotilda-survivor (https://www.history.com/news/zora-neale-hurston-barracoon-slave-clotilda-survivor)
Interesting read.
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Mark for later reading.
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Since the practice of international slave trading into the US was illegal for 5 years prior to this guy landing, am wondering how anyone could possibly know who the last slave ship survivor actually was?
Other sources I read said this was the last known slave ship, the Clotilda. Likely not the last one.
This all sounds interesting, but cannot be verified as true whatsoever.