New Book Traces Origins of Last Slaves Smuggled into the United States
Dr. Natalie Robertson will be in Mobile Thursday, August 7, 2008. She will be at the Museum of Mobile, 111 South Royal Street, in historic downtown, to sign her book "The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Making of AfricaTown,U.S.A," available for purchase in the Shoppe at the Southern Market, at 4:30pm before her reading at 5pm. She will continue signing at 6pm. For more information, call 208-7569.
New Book Traces Origins of Last Slaves Smuggled into the United States
Hampton (July 31, 2008) Dr. Natalie S. Robertson, an Associate Professor of History at Hampton University and author of the recently published book entitled The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Making of AfricaTown, U.S.A.: Spirit of Our Ancestors, launches her national book tour beginning August 7 in Mobile, Alabama at The Museum of Mobile.
Dr Robertson’s scholarship is recognized both nationally and internationally, having held teaching and research appointments at prestigious institutions such as the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, the Advanced Studies in England Program (affiliated with University College, Oxford), and the United States National Slavery Museum where she currently holds the position of Senior Scholar, appointed by The Honorable L. Douglas Wilder, the museum’s Founder and Chairman of the Board of Directors.
Dr. Robertson has also conducted primary research in three West African slave-ports (Whydah, Badagry, and Gorée), in connection with the publication of this book that tracks the transatlantic smuggling voyage of the slave ship Clotilda; that reveals the economic, political, and legal factors that gave rise to the Clotilda smuggling crime during the slave trade’s illegal period; that dramatizes the plight of the Clotilda captives from their respective points of capture in the West African interior to their collective point of disembarkation in Alabama; that traces the captives’ origins to specific places and peoples in West Africa; that demonstrates the manner in which those spirited captives triumphed over their tragedy by establishing their own community called AfricaTown (Alabama); and, that examines the extent to which their descendants continue to preserve, and promote, the legacies of their West African ancestors.
The book also pays homage to ancestor Zora Neale Hurston, the African-American anthropologist and folklorist who numbered among the early investigators who collected information from the Clotilda captive named Cudjo Lewis in the early 20th century. Dr. Robertson builds upon, and extends, Hurston’s research legacy by collecting and incorporating primary data from the descendants of the Clotilda captives as well as the descendants of the West African slave dealers who sold their ancestors into slavery via the slave-ports of Badagry and Whydah. Based upon fifteen years of transatlantic research, this book concludes with a discussion of the burgeoning reparations debate, exposing the culpability of federal officials who aided and abetted slave smugglers during the illegal period and exposing the private, governmental, and corporate links to slavery.
The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Making of AfricaTown, U.S.A.: Spirit of Our Ancestors has received generous support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and it has been endorsed by Bill Cosby, author of Come On People: On the Path From Victims to Victors.
More information about the book, its author, and her national tour can be accessed at: www.theslaveshipclotilda.com. To schedule an interview or a two-hour digital slide-presentation of Dr. Robertson’s fifteen-year, transatlantic research odyssey in search of primary data for the book, contact tour@theslaveshipclotilda.com.
