This print, titled “ALL SAILS FINAL”, was financed by a private collector, and printed at the University of Alabama on the occasion of the discovery of the Clotilda: the last known slaveship to arrive in the United States. Since all historical accounts of the slave ship Clotilda ended with its owners torching the 86-foot schooner down to its hull and burying it at the bottom of Alabama’s Mobile Bay, historians feared that this ship had been forever lost. Then, in early 2020, researchers aided by NMAAHC, recovered its remnants.
When the slave ship Clotilda arrived in the United States in 1860, it marked the persistence of the practice of cruel forced migration of people from Africa. Congress had outlawed the international slave trade more than 50 years before. The ship docked off the shore of Mobile, Alabama, at night to escape the eyes of law enforcement and deposited 110 men, women, and children stolen away from their homeland in modern-day Benin. The ship’s arrival on the cusp of the Civil War is a testament to slavery’s legal presence in America until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. After the war, people who had been held captive aboard the ship helped found the community of Africatown, a community that exists to this day.
However, over the years, Africatown has seen its share of downtimes. Commerce is gone, and boarded-up homes and vacant lots barely pass as neighborhoods. The population has declined from about 12,000 in the 1960s to under 2,000 today. In 2012, Africatown was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, but little came of the designation. This print, a take off on the Alabama Coat of Arms, was created to serve as a fund raiser for that community.
All proceeds in support of Africatown. Click here to purchase.