Freedom Seekers

In 1808, a federal law finally began the prohibition of importing enslaved persons into the United States. It did not affect the domestic trade of enslaved labor; it only slowed the international practice to and from the United States, sending it underground. For some half a century later, Alabama businessman Timothy Meaher smuggled a shipfull of enslaved people into Mobile. He sailed the Clotilda to West Africa and returned in 1860 with 110 Africans (another didn’t survive the Middle Passage) for sale. Then he set the boat afire in Mobile Bay to conceal his crimes.

Six years later, those Africans brought to Alabama, now freedmen and women, and their descendants founded a community in the northern Mobile outskirts known as Africatown. They knew their history, though the dominant culture’s official accounts of the area only sometimes acknowledge the legacy. Some 10,000 people called Africatown home by 1920. Two decades later, Africatown’s residents would also come to know the disastrous effects of the environmental racism, as their community became home to a paper plant which, a 2017 lawsuit later alleged, ruined the land and water with cancer-causing waste and pollution. As those issues came to light, so did the remnants of the Clotilda, thanks to archeological efforts organized by the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Slave Wrecks Project. It’s an undeniable proof of the ship’s existence and of Africatown’s roots which Clotilda descendants still in the area know in their bones.

On October 20, 2023, the Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites (CPCRS)  and the Department of Historic Preservation at Weitzman, as well as the Center for Africana Studies at Penn presented What Remains: Preserving the Heritage of Africatown, a daylong symposium at the Penn Museum organized by Amber Wiley, PhD, the Matt and Erika Nord Director at CPCRS and Presidential Associate Professor at Weitzman. Three panels offered insights and interrogated narratives as they moved through the past, present, and potential future of Africatown.    

Wiley sought to place the story of Africatown and its residences in a proper historical context. “When we think about civil rights sites, we’re not just talking about the classic civil rights period of 1954 to 1968,” she said. “We’re actually talking about the Black freedom struggle from the 1800s to the present day….The struggle is more than just Brown v. Board of Education, more than just the Voting Rights Act. It’s abolitionism. It’s freedom seekers.”

The first panel moderated by Matt Kenyatta, PhD, director of Justice and Belonging (JxB) at Weitzman, explored the ways the story of Africatown has been told. In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston completed a manuscript of interviews she conducted with Oluale Kossola, among the very last survivors of the Middle Passage. He asked her to tell people who he was, said Deborah Plant, PhD, the editor of Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo,” the 2018 collection of Hurston’s interviews. Plant told the audience of her Fulbright to Banon, the village in Burkina Faso where Kossola grew up, where she met its king and residents. In Kossola’s conversation with Hurston, she said, “he can reassert his humanity, because in America the question wasn’t who he was. The question was what he was and what he was going to be used for.”

Scholar Sylviane Diouf, PhD, author of Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America, urged attendees to consider the collectivity of the Africatown survivors. “There is not one person who singularly embodies the story of people who were deported on the Clotilda,” she said. “What the people of Africatown and their scattered survivors let us imagine is what the hopes of these millions of men, women, and children could have been.” And Nick Tabor, author of Africatown: America’s Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created, offered documents of how American governments have exploited and denied the existence of the ship and the persistence of the contemporary industrial pollution. “Every generation,” he said, “tells this story in its own way.”

“What the people of Africatown and their scattered survivors let us imagine is what the hopes of these millions of men, women, and children could have been.”

Historical frameworks established, the event moved onto its second panel, moderated by Weitzman’s Rashida Ng, Presidential Associate Professor and chair of undergraduate architecture. As a site of complex intersections of race, ecology, and economics, she said, “Africatown is a microcosm of Black America.” Africatown Heritage Preservation Foundation Co-founder Major Joe Womack USMCR (ret) took the audience on a journey through the town’s history in 50-year sections—with a particular emphasis on the way locals are organizing to clean up the pollution without gentrifying out its long-time residents. It’s a long process, he said, noting that “I’ve been doing this for seventeen years and just got to the starting block.” Joycelyn Davis, an organizer of the Spirit of our Ancestors Festival and member of the Clotilda Descendants Association, questioned why it’s taken so long for Africatown to begin receiving the attention and resources afforded to other Black historical sites, while also urging the audience to wonder what might happen when the current spotlight on the town fades. Last year, Descendant, a documentary on the town, premiered on Netflix. Third-generation Clotilda descendant and community organizer Veda Robbins, who, along with other descendants and residents was featured in the film, became worried about what would happen with a potential influx of investments and attention occasioned by the documentary. “I was really concerned with community ownership,” she said, and so she partnered with non-profit arts and culture intermediary The BIG We as their point person in Africatown. “I’m trying to build relationships, and still poking around,” she said. “Things are improving. But I want to keep an eye on where things are going.”

Finally, World Monuments Fund Regional Director of North America Ann Cuss offered a challenge to the audience of historians, policymakers, designers, and storytellers: “Africatown was a self-governing community,” she said in echo of Diouf’s earlier descriptions of the society the residents set up for themselves. “The dominant culture doesn’t want to recognize that, it scares them….Where do we see this in the history books? Where do we hear these stories of actual communities that come together? This is a textbook example. But where’s the textbook?”

When it’s written, a major figure will surely be Renee Kemp-Rotan, an urban designer and planner who in 2022 launched the Africatown International Design Idea Competition. Kemp-Rotan kicked off the third and final panel with a presentation about her process. “Originally, I came up with the idea of a competition as a tool,” she says. “I was thinking we’ll have people around the world help us figure out what an imaginary Africatown museum would look like. Great idea! I went back to the community and the community said: ‘We need more than that. We need housing, we need someone to take a look at the school, at the cemetery’…by the time they’d finished I had a list of sixteen things the community needed to have designed.” The competition became a juried effort to conceive storytelling and architectural preservation ideas for four sites within Africatown. “I figured out how to organize all those wishes into the largest, multisite, Afrocentric competition the world has ever seen,” she says. “Architecturally, we’re asking: What would the future of Africatown look like? And what role can Black architects play in that future?”

“This is part of a journey of asking how our discipline, the built environment professions, can begin to speak a different language.”

Jerome Haferd, an architect, artist, activist, and educator based in New York City, won the Africatown International Idea Competition to design the first plan, on the grounds of the recently-razed Josephine Allen Houses. His proposal comprises maritime housing, a boathouse for the Clotilda, and civic areas that literally flow into the floodplain, in material palettes including rammed earth and woven wood. “What does it mean for the land to be broker of our reparations?” Haferd asked the audience. His answer is “an in-between that is neither land nor sea…this in-betweeness that we see again and again in the Black diaspora.” 

Haferd discussed plans for the Africatown museum with panel moderator Kwesi Daniels, department head and associate professor of architecture at Tuskegee University (a CPCRS institutional partner), along with Kemp-Rotan and Mario Gooden, an architect, professor of professional practice and director of the Master of Architecture Program at Columbia. All agreed the traditional museum was a Eurocentric idea inappropriate for the project. “You couldn’t just design a museum that you’d seen before, somewhere else, for Africatown,” Gooden said. For Haferd, the competition was a chance to rethink the profession from the ground-up. “This is part of a journey of asking how our discipline, the built environment professions, can begin to speak a different language. We don’t have a lot of this content in our history. When you go to architecture school, until very recently, you learned about the Parthenon and Rome and that’s pretty much it.” Haferd looked to other crucial sites of Black history to inform his design. “The Harlem African Burial Ground is a site that has no heroic architecture and has been desecrated. How do we think about preservation in that context?” In this case, Afrofuturism isn’t only about speculating what’s to come, but what could have been. “What would we have built if we had the resources in the first place?” he asked. “That is what’s at stake with preservation.” And Kemp-Rotan brought things back home, with a passionate explanation of Africatown’s importance. “It is the only 19th-century settlement built in America by Africans,” she said. “All the other charter towns were built by African-Americans. It’s the only sample we have, so it has to be protected. It’s a very spiritual place.”

The day ended with some responses to the panel by Africatown residents in the audience, each looking resolutely towards the site’s potential to help us understand the past. Their stories echoed the centrality Plant placed on the site at the beginning of the symposium. “Where did this rich legacy of Africatown come from?” she asked. The answer, she said, helps us “begin to understand something about African spirituality, African genius, African ingenuity. And then we begin to see what it is that makes a human being—what it is that makes a society.”