Can't remember if I've mentioned this one or not.
The discovery carries intense personal meaning for an Alabama community of descendants of the ship's survivors
www.smithsonianmag.com
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
As far as we know, the Clotilda was the last slave ship to unload human cargo on US soil. Importing slaves was already illegal at the time, although ownership was not. Timothy Meaher, a prominent Mobilian, bet, "a thousand dollars that inside two years I myself can bring a shipful of (
censored) right into Mobile Bay under the officers' noses." He made good on the bet by building a ship, hiring a captain, and smuggling 124 Africans between the ages of 5 and 23 years old into Mobile Bay. They were offloaded onto 12 Mile Island (excellent hog hunting there in the present day, been many times) while the ship was burned and sank to eliminate evidence. They were left there for several days to avoid suspicion, then retrieved and either sold off or put to work on the Meaher estate.
After slavery was abolished, they were able to purchase some land and make a community called Africatown. They did fairly well for themselves by most accounts since they were not born into slavery, but remembered life as free men and women.
Sadly, the state built highway 98 right up Africatown's main street several decades back, taking out the motel and several restaurants and other businesses, which began the rapid and severe deterioration of the community. The city of Mobile also zoned the surrounding area for heavy industrial use. Residents' backyards, schools, and cemeteries back right up against paper mills, coal piles, oil storage tanks, and other hazards.
Meanwhile, we have a state park and several streets with the Meaher name, and Timothy's great-great's have been involved in several lawsuits regarding whether or not they can keep fishermen out of Big and Little Chippewa Lakes, which (for now, according to the courts) are somehow not navigable because they aren't subject to tidal influence, even though I'm on the same latitude line and the water in my backyard is definitely subject to tidal influence, and I could access the lakes just fine until they blocked the channel...
For more unknown and very sad history, the heart of Africatown is maybe a mile or two away from Michael Donald Avenue, named after a young man the KKK lynched in 1981 in response to a black man in Birmingham, AL being acquitted of the murder of a police officer. If there's a silver lining to a story like that, it's that his mother sued the Klan and was awarded a very large settlement, which many historian consider to have been a nail in the coffin with regards to the Klan being an active political force.