In the summer of 1860, more than fifty years after Congress banned the importation of enslaved Africans, wealthy Mobile businessman Timothy Meaher illegally smuggled 110 kidnapped West Africans into Mobile Bay aboard the schooner Clotilda, the last known slave ship to reach the United States. After emancipation, roughly thirty survivors, unable to afford passage home, pooled their earnings to buy land north of Mobile and founded Africatown, where they preserved West African language, customs, and governance for decades. Survivor Cudjo Lewis became the community's best-known voice, recounting his life to Zora Neale Hurston in the book "Barracoon." The Clotilda's scuttled wreck was finally confirmed in the Mobile River in 2019, and Africatown remains home to descendants today.