Descendants of Last Slave Ship to America Are Alive in Alabama

For most black Americans descended from enslaved Africans, there’s no way of tracing back where their ancestors came from. The slave trade ripped families apart, and records from slave ships and plantations often identified enslaved people with multiple or incomplete names. Given this systematic erasure, the story of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to reach the U.S., occupies a profoundly unique place in the history of the transatlantic slave trade.