c. 1841 – July 17, 1935
Cudjoe Kazoola Lewis (c. 1841 – July 17, 1935), around 1841 in West Africa, was born as Kossola or Oluale Kossola (Americans would later transcribe his given name as “Kazoola”), also known as Cudjo Lewis. He was the third to last adult survivor of the Atlantic slave trade between Africa and the United States.
Together with 115 other African captives, he was brought to the United States on board the ship Clotilda in 1860.
The captives were landed in backwaters of the Mobile River near Mobile, Alabama, and hidden from authorities. The ship was scuttled to evade discovery, and remained undiscovered until January 2018.
The Africans settled in Plateau, Alabama, a poor rural community near Mobile. They called their community Africatown.
Cudjoe Lewis
One of The Last Enslaved African brought to America
Born 1841 – Died July 17, 1935
Historian Sylviane Diouf has concluded that he and most other members of the Africatown community belonged to the Yoruba people from the Banté region of Benin. Lewis’s father was Oluwale (or Oluale) and his mother Fondlolu; he had five full siblings and twelve half-siblings through his father’s other two wives.
In 1859 the schooner Clotilde (or Clotilda), under the command of William Foster, arrived in Mobile Bay carrying a cargo of Africans, numbering between 110 and 160 slaves. Captain Foster worked for Timothy Meaher, a wealthy Mobile shipper and shipyard owner, who had built the Clotilde in 1856.
Local lore claims that Meaher bet some “Northern gentlemen” that he could violate the 1807 law without getting caught. The Clotilde was a 2-masted schooner, 86 feet long and 23 feet wide, with a copper hull. Meaher learned through word of mouth that West African Tribes were fighting and that the King of Dahomey was willing to trade Africans for $50 each at Whydah, Dahomey. Foster arrived in Whydah on May 15, 1859. He bought the Africans from several different tribes and headed back to Mobile.
Lewis and other members of the Clotilda group became free. A number of them founded a community at Magazine Point, north of Mobile, Alabama. They were joined there by others born in Africa. Now designated as the Africatown Historic District, the community was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2012.
After realizing that they would not be able to return to Africa, the group deputized Lewis to ask Timothy Meaher for a grant of land. When he refused, the members of the community continued to raise money and began to purchase land around Magazine Point. On September 30, 1872, Lewis bought about two acres of land in the Plateau area for $100.00.
They developed Africatown as a self-contained, independent black community. The group appointed leaders to enforce communal norms derived from their shared African background. They also developed institutions including a church, a school, and a cemetery. Diouf explains that Africatown was unique because it was both a “black town,” inhabited exclusively by people of African ancestry, and an enclave of people born in another country. She writes, “Black towns were safe havens from racism, but African Town was a refuge from Americans.”
He lived to 1935 and was long thought to be the last survivor of the Clotilda, until historian Hannah Durkin identified two longer-lived Clotilda survivors, who made the voyage as children: Redoshi, who died in 1937, and Matilda McCrear, who died in 1940.
Resorces
https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question/2005/july.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cudjoe_Lewis
https://www.geni.com/people/Cudjo-Lewis-the-last-African-Slave/6000000030523450947