Discussion and Celebration of “Africatown: America's Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created” (Nick Tabor) for a suggested donation of $15 or $7 on Saturday, February 25th at 7PM
Join us for a discussion between journalists and reporters Nick Tabor and Ese Olumhense for a discussion of Nick’s forthcoming book, “Africatown: America's Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created”(St. Martin’s Press)! “Africatown” will be released on February 21st and available for sale after the book talk.
The conversation will be followed by a reception with drinks and light refreshments.
An evocative and epic story, Nick Tabor's Africatown charts the fraught history of America from those who were brought here as slaves but nevertheless established a home for themselves and their descendants, a community which often thrived despite persistent racism and environmental pollution.
In 1860, a ship called the Clotilda was smuggled through the Alabama Gulf Coast, carrying the last group of enslaved people ever brought to the U.S. from West Africa. Five years later, the shipmates were emancipated, but they had no way of getting back home. Instead they created their own community outside the city of Mobile, where they spoke Yoruba and appointed their own leaders, a story chronicled in Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon.
That community, Africatown, has endured to the present day, and many of the community residents are the shipmates’ direct descendants. After many decades of neglect and a Jim Crow legal system that targeted the area for industrialization, the community is struggling to survive. Many community members believe the pollution from the heavy industry surrounding their homes has caused a cancer epidemic among residents, and companies are eyeing even more land for development.
At the same time, after the discovery of the remains of the Clotilda in the riverbed nearby, a renewed effort is underway to create a living memorial to the community and the lives of the slaves who founded it.
Nick Tabor is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in New York Magazine, The New Republic, The Washington Post, Oxford American, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Africatown is his first book. He lives in New York.
Ese Olumhense is a reporter for Reveal, covering democracy and gender rights. She joins Reveal from City Limits, a nonprofit investigative organization that covers New York City, where she was a senior editor/reporter for politics and investigations. Olumhense previously worked for Spotlight PA and THE CITY, two other nonprofit journalism outlets, and the Chicago Tribune. As part of a team at THE CITY, Olumhense won the Online News Association’s 2021 Knight Award for Public Service for Missing Them, a collaborative project to remember every New Yorker killed by COVID-19. For the project, she investigated the potential link between the poor air quality in neighborhoods near freeways and COVID-19 death tolls. Olumhense is also an adjunct faculty member at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, working with investigative reporting fellows there.
Books will available for purchase on-site courtesy of Revolution Books.
