The Last Slave Ship - Ben Raines

The true story of the last ship to carry enslaved people to America, the remarkable town its survivors founded after emancipation, and the complicated legacy their descendants carry with them to this day---by the journalist who discovered the ships remains. 

Fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed, the Clotilda became the last ship to bring enslaved Africans to the United States. The ship was burned and remained hidden for the next 160 years. But in 2019, Ben Raines successfully concluded his obsessive quest to uncover one of the nation's most important historical artifacts in the swamps of Alabama. 

  Traveling from Alabama to the ancient African kingdom of Dahomey in modern-day Benin, Raines recounts how the Clotilda is a ghost haunting three communities: the descendants of those transported into slavery, the descendants of their fellow Africans who sold them, and the descendants of their American enslavers. Against all odds, the captives of the Clotilda founded Africatown, a community in Alabama that prospered in the Jim Crow South. But the memory of bondage that haunts the town reveals how America still struggles to grapple with its history of slavery and the ways in which racial oppression continues to this day. Yet, at its heart, The Last Slave Ship remains optimistic---an epic tale of one community's triumphs over great adversity and a celebration of the power of human curiosity to uncover the truth about our past and heal its wounds.