The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Africatown: America’s Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created by Nick Tabor

Episode Date: March 4, 2023

Africatown: America's Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created by Nick Tabor 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.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from the chrisvossshow.com, the Chris Voss Show. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you guys being here. We are, the chris faas show the family loves you but doesn't judge you

at least not as harshly as your mother or mother-in-law now go clean your room no i'm just kidding folks anyway guys go to goodreads.com for chest chris faas youtube.com for chest chris faas uh what else is there there's a the big linkedin group 130 000 people linkedin.com newsletter that's very popular over there you can go check that out there's one for myself and for the chris voss show uh and so that should be pretty cool uh we have an amazing historical author on the show this is his first book that he's put out and it's going to educate us on a lot of different things i love history uh you know the one thing man can learn from his history, as I always say, is man. I set that up with a little bit of a sidewind there.

The one thing man can learn from his history is the man never learns from his history. And thereby we just go round and round and make all the same mistakes. So the great historians, journalists, and authors that come on the show, they help educate us so that we learn stuff so that we'll be smarter, brillianter, and more sexy in the eyes of others, but also to learn stuff so we don't make the same mistakes again, and maybe we can create a better future. So that's important. We have Nick Tabber on the show, and Nick Tabber is on the show with us today he is the author of africatown uh america's last slave ship and the community it created welcome to the show nick how are you very good thanks for having me there you go and nick you're a freelance journalist whose

work has appeared in new york magazine the new york the new republic the washington post and the paris review and elsewhere you live live in New York and it's your first book. Welcome to the show. Congratulations on the new book. Give us a.com where people can find you on the interwebs. Yeah, it's just my name, nicktaber.com. There you go. And Nick, what motivated you want to write this book? Well, this book originated when I was on staff at New York Magazine in 2018. There was this book coming out called Barracoon, written by Zora Neale Hurston. She wrote it in the 1920s, but it wasn't published for 90 years. And it consists of her interviews with Kajo Lewis, who was one of the last survivors still living from the last slave ship that ever

came to the US. She interviewed him when he was like in his 80s. And so it's this amazing historical document that just kind of sat in the vault for decades. So when it was being published, my editor called me in and said, hey, we're going to be publishing an excerpt of this book in the magazine. It would be really great if we could also have a story about what became of the descendants of this guy, Coach O'Lewis. And so she said, see if you can find him. You know, it might not be easy, but I think you can do it. So it took a couple of weeks to track them down. They had not really made themselves known. But eventually I did reach one of them, a guy named Gary Lumbers, who was living in Philadelphia. And the first time I got Gary on the phone,

I remember I was at this hotel room in West Texas working on another story. And he said pretty forcefully, you don't need to be writing about the descendants. You need to be writing about the neighborhood. Because the survivors of the slave ship created a community after the Civil War, after they were freed, called Africantown. The name has now been shortened to one word, Africa town. When he was growing, it's still around. When he was growing up there, he said it was it was this thriving community. There, there were lots of jobs. There were lots of big families.

It was like an, like a, an idyllic experience for him as a child. He said, now, if you go there, it looks like a war zone. They built a highway through the center of the community that wiped out the main business district. Wow. He said that the whole area is surrounded by heavy industry. There's so much pollution. People think there's a cancer epidemic. And so it was obviously, and the population was like a fraction of what it had been when he was a kid.

So he was saying this is not just like another story of like deindustrialization, like Flint or something where a factory leaves. It was like this neighborhood was actively destroyed. And he wanted to know how that happened. He said, that's what you should be writing about. And I ended up visiting and I met, I happened to be there on a day when this law firm was interviewing people about cancer cases. They were getting ready to sue one of the paper mills that had long been in Africatown, getting ready to sue them for all the pollution on the basis that they had caused all these cancer

cases. So I interviewed a whole bunch of people at this church who each could just rattle off a list of people from their families who had died from cancer often at young ages and a lot of people who had survived it themselves. And the pastor told me that it had been that way ever since he came to the neighborhood. It really seemed like more than just your standard amount of cancer in a community. So it left a stark impression on me. I kept thinking, you know, what is the link between the slave ship and the pollution? Uh, like how did this neighborhood get, get sort of singled out to bear so much of the industrial pollution of

Southern Alabama, like of all the places they could have put it, put those factories, why did they choose the neighborhood that was established by the survivors of the last slave ship? Oh, wow. And so I wanted to piece it together. So, yeah, I kept thinking, I wish I could just move down there and devote myself to that full time and really piece together all of those links decade by decade. And then it occurred to me one day on my walk home from the subway that I probably could do that, that a publisher would be interested. And so at the end of 2019, with a book contract in hand, I moved down to Alabama to investigate that question.

Wow. There you go. Now, moving down there, I mean, are you a little concerned? Do you move to Africatown specifically? And, you know, I mean, with the pollution and cancer rates and stuff, or do you move someplace close by? I moved to a place close by. There's not a lot of rental property, you know, within Africatown anyway. And it's quite an intimate community. And it wouldn't have felt appropriate for me to move right into the center of it.

But I was there often. I was really a pretty short bike ride away living within Mobile. And for the first few months before the COVID lockdowns began, I was there just about every day. Anytime there was a meeting in the community or some kind of event, I was there. If there was a cleanup day, you know, I was there with a rake or a shovel, like not just reporting, but volunteering. So I immersed myself in the place as much as I could. There you go. And so the book is a story that's not only about uh the original this this slave ship the last slave ship uh it's about

this community and then also uh what's kind of built as environmental racism yeah that's true i mean the slave the story of the slave ship itself um is pretty riveting i should say um it's worth giving some background on that i think the. So the voyage began in the spring of 1860. Mobile was one of the largest port cities in the United States. It was third, in fact, right after New York and New Orleans. So much cotton being moved in and out of Africa town or of Mobile. And so there was this shortage of, of enslaved people, of enslaved workers.

It was not legal to import them from West Africa anymore. They had long since banned, this country had long since banned the transatlantic slave trade. But this business magnate named timothy mayor who owned a lumber mill and a shipyard and some other some other businesses um he the the lore is that he told his friends um he said well you know the federal government says they're going to crack down on these illegal voyages, but I don't believe it. And I'll put my money where my mouth is, and I will send a ship to West Africa and bring over 100 slaves.

And I'm going to show, I'm going to prove that the federal government isn't serious and that you can still get away with this. And it seems as if he meant this as an act of political protest. He was like, he and quite a few other Southern businessmen were pushing to have the slave trade reopened. And so this was, it seems like this was part of that campaign. He was, as I say, he was kind of putting his money where his mouth was. So he sent this ship over it arrived in um the port of ouida in the gulf of guinea that spring um carried over uh about 110 men women and children across the middle passage the journey took about six or seven weeks and was

you know just a truly horrific um experience for the people on board um they uh the ship sneaked into mobile bay uh the captain transferred all the people to another another ship and then and hid them in like a swamp for for weeks and burned the ship down to the water line to destroy the evidence to make sure that that it would be impossible to prosecute them and everybody in mobile knew about this uh it was reported in the newspaper immediately and then went global um i found dozens like scores of newspapers um where it was reported that week um mostly in the u.s but also in europe and i've always suspected that that um the guy who was behind it all actually tipped the newspaper

off we don't know but that's that's that's sort of my guess well educated guess so so he um so he got away with it uh the the prosecutors, the local federal prosecutor knew about it, but didn't prosecute anyone. The Civil War started nine months after the voyage. And after that, nobody wanted to prosecute somebody. Nobody in the South was going to prosecute someone for bringing slaves over. So five years later, these people were emancipated, and they had no way of getting back to West Africa. They wanted to go back home, but they couldn't.

So they created this. So a few dozen of them out of more than 100 created this community where they could speak Yoruba and, uh, and other West African languages and, uh, choose their own leaders and, um, and sort of be left alone and govern themselves. They bought property, they built houses, uh, and this place became, yeah, became known as African town. There's, there's really nothing else like it. Um, in the United States, a community that was created by people who had been, um, brought through the middle path by West Africans who had themselves survived the middle passage. Um, so yeah. So because it's such a dramatic history, I thought, um, I thought this was the perfect, the perfect story, um story to talk about environmental racism. So this is a widespread problem. It's a common thing for communities of color to be heavily overburdened with pollution,

or in some cases, just to have really bad infrastructure to be under heavily overburdened with pollution or in some cases just to have really bad infrastructure to be underdeveloped you know there are cases in in states like alabama where where communities of color just don't have like functioning sewers and plumbing but more often it takes the form of like factory pollution or here in New York where I am, we have like we have this section in the Bronx that we call Asthma Alley. The Cross Bronx Expressway highway runs through it. And there's so much exhaust from the cars that that kids who grow up there very often suffer from asthma and um in in so many of these cases the racial composition of the neighborhood is directly linked to the like the development patterns and the ways that that factories got cited there or highways got built there um and so so the point of this book was to figure out how it happened in this one community.

But also, like through that lens to get a better sense of how it happens everywhere and why, why places like the South Bronx exist too. I really could say that, by extension, it's a way of trying to understand better, you know, how race still, how it how it still plays a role in, in the way our cities are shaped and, um, and distribution of power and, and, um, and who controls what resources. Yeah. Uh, we had Eddie Glad Jr. on the show and we talked about, uh, how, you know, communities are built, freeways are built, you know, we were built to separate us from each other, white and black communities and sadly create, you know, blighted areas that didn't have a lot of jobs and other opportunities and

it kind of, you know, you end up with different issues and I'm sure pollution is another factor, but this is a pretty unique story. Um, you know, and, and he'd written a book on, um, Baldwin, James Baldwin. Yeah. Begin again. And, and the interesting thing about James Baldwin, you can take and lift all of his quotes and all of his writings from the sixties and fifties and literally just transpose them to today and they still work sadly um so this is really interesting and it's extraordinary it's the last slave ship because it had been outlawed they came in they cover it up these folks build a community because they miss their homeland and they want to speak their language and then so what happens after this does does basically robber barons or people

of industry white people of industry take advantage of them by coming in with pollutive pollution generating uh things and then you know you've got jim crow laws that come in and different things like that how does it evolve from there to where now it's become incredibly polluted and they have cancer issues kind Kind of like, it kind of almost seems like a, who's that one gal Brockovich, Aaron Brock, Brockovich movie sort of thing.

Yeah, it is quite similar. Yeah. I, um, I was able to find answers in the course of my, you know, a couple of years of research.

I always think that you have to go back to reconstruction, uh, right after the civil war to understand the broader story. So right after the war, it was unclear what the North, what the federal government was going to do for the black people in the South who had just been set free. And one of my favorite Americans is Thaddeus Stevens, who was one of the radical Republican legislators. So he gave a speech in 1865, right after the war in Pennsylvania, where he said, if we're really serious about reforming this country and reforming the South, what we need to do is seize the the plantations like take the land from those southern aristocrats um break break those plantations up and give the land to the black

people and he said we'll accomplish two things that way we'll create this broad class of of black entrepreneurs you know yeoman farmers at the same time we'll also break up the planter class and and shatter their their power and their hold on southern politics and the economy for good um and um it obviously did not happen um like the the the confederates you know the confederate traders did not have their their land taken away from them. And so people, I bring it, part of the reason I bring it up is that people like Timothy Mayer, the guy who chartered this slave voyage, would have been exactly the kind of person who would have been targeted by a policy like that. He owned all of this land and had all of this wealth. And if a proposal like that of Stephen's idea had gone through, then that

wealth, that land and that wealth would have been redistributed to, you know, probably did some of the people that he brought over on the Clotilda. Instead, he held on to it. he passed it on to his kids in around the turn of the century all these Jim Crow laws were passed and it's not just I think it's important to understand that Jim Crow laws were not just segregation laws they were also like all of the southern governments starting with Mississippi created new laws or in some cases rewrote their constitutions to systematically strip Black people of their voting rights. Wow. So they just had no political power anymore. They had no way of standing up for their rights. And so it's sort of a deadly combination of no,

for them to turn out to be deadly, no wealth, no land, forced to continue working for pitiful wages for the people who used to keep them enslaved. At the same time, northern industries started making incursions on the south. It was like the first version of offshoring jobs to other countries. These northern companies founded in the south, there were no unions, and the southern governments were so happy to have them they would just let them do anything let them let them tear apart the forests let them pollute the rivers um and uh and let them treat the workers poorly and so the the people who benefited from that were the were the wealthy people in the south like the mayor family who already had this land. We see how this plays out in Africatown in the 1920s. The largest paper company in New England

approached the Chamber of Commerce in Mobile and said, we want to build a paper factory somewhere in your county. Can you hook us up? And it looks as if the way this happened is the Chamber of commerce said, yeah, you should,

you know, like let us introduce you to the, the mayor family, the, the grand or the son of the guy who brought the slaves over. Like he has lots of land that nobody's using. And so the company ended up, I think, originally leasing and maybe later buying, excuse me, some property from the Mayer family, built this enormous paper factory at the border of Africatown. People didn't know as much about environmental health back then, but they knew that paper factories smelled terrible. And of course, they didn't want as much about environmental health back then but they knew that paper factories smelled terrible and of course they didn't want it downtown um but um the people living in africatown

didn't have any any say over whether they wanted it in their backyard or not and um so after that one was built um the the area became increasingly industrialized and um more and more factories were added on and a lot of that land actually was was built on or excuse me a lot of that a lot of those factories were built on land that belonged to the family of of the guy who brought the people over wow this is extraordinary it's again you have multi-generational environmental racism, basically. They go hand-in-hand down through generations and land and surrounded the town. This is from an article from 2018, and they talked about how activists successfully defeated an oil storage tank farm proposal in 2015, but last year, this would have been 2017, Mobile adopted

a future land use plan that leaves Africa Town's small residential area protected from the continued threat of further industrialization. So, you know, even as recently as a few years ago, this sort of issue is going on. I was also reading in The Guardian that from that same time in 2018, Senator Cory Booker and EPA environmental justice lead was, was looking into it. Has anything come of this as have they, are they still,

have they still lost their rights? Has there been anything that the attorneys are, are helping achieve or, or any politicians or politics or the EPA? There have been some developments. I mean, first I should say that the wreckage of the ship itself, the Clotilda, was identified in the Mobile Delta in 2000. It was 2019 when they announced it.

It took like a year's worth of research before they felt confident that the ship that they had singled out was the right one. And that was an extraordinary piece of news. I mean, very few slave wrecks have ever been found off of the American coastlines. And this one is probably the most intact of any slave ship we've ever identified. Wow. So that's a big deal the people in africatown

are trying to they think feel like their best hope for um protecting the community and and um and restoring the housing and bringing some jobs they think their best hope is to uh is to make it sort of a heritage tourism destination. Yeah. You know, you mentioned EJI equal justice initiative. They have this lynching Memorial in Montgomery and, and it's,

it's pretty, it's a pretty unsettling experience to go to that Memorial and the museum that's connected. But it's, it's a profound experience. I have to say. It's something you never forget. And within a year of it opening, it had brought thousands, I think, maybe hundreds of thousands of visitors from all over the world, and had generated something like $1 billion in economic activity for the city of Montgomery. And so we feel like people in the community feel like there is an appetite for that kind of experience that helps you, I guess, sort of get, encourages you to reflect on some of the most horrific episodes from American history.

Of course, it's also, in this case, it's also a story of heroism, I think, and endurance. At any rate, that's what they have in mind. The discovery of the ship is a big asset in that endeavor. The other thing that's happened is there was a documentary that aired on, on Netflix. It's still on, but it debuted in the fall. Uh,

it was backed by the Obama's production company. Uh, some of your viewers and listeners might've seen it. It's called descendant. Oh, and, and, um,

it's a, it's a marvelous documentary. It, it, uh, just, I think a brilliant piece of filmmaking. I was involved in making it, but I'm not taking any credit here.

It's because of other... My role was pretty small, and it's because of the work of many others on the team, especially the director, Margaret Brown, that it was so good. That has brought a huge amount of attention to this neighborhood. And on the strength of that documentary um a coalition from africatown recently went recently visited the white house um and spoke with members of the of the biden administration um there's uh quite a lot more money coming in to the community now. There is, so there's a lot of support from outside. The city of Mobile, like, it's my perception is that the city of Mobile can't decide whether it wants to be more like Charleston, South Carolina, and emphasize its beautiful, what could be a beautiful water front. Unfortunately, the waterfront is all occupied by heavy industry and you can't really

get to the water in Mobile. But that's one version of Mobile that we could have. It still has some beautiful architecture downtown, has great seafood. Whether they want to make it a tourist destination like that, or whether they want to make it a tourist destination like that or whether they want to stake everything on the petroleum industry like houston and um and you can't have both you know those are two two very different kinds of cities and um so but they they like to think that they can have both so they they tend to give lip service to these efforts to make Africa town, uh, heritage tourism destination,

but in practice, um, they're not really giving a lot of meaningful support. Um, there is however, a, um, a museum opening,

uh, in July there, uh, that'll be the first piece of like real infrastructure that the community has for receiving visitors. And so we're all looking forward to that. It'll be a good development. Awesome. What do you hope people come away with reading the book and learning about this important piece of history that shaped us?

You know, I've sometimes thought that, so i guess it depends on who the reader is i sometimes thought when i was working on this that i wanted to i thought about what i was like when i was a teenager this you know a pretty conservative teenager actually growing up in in the midwest and i felt like maybe maybe there was a time when affirmative action made sense, but at that point, it certainly did not. I thought it was just whatever, reverse racism. I just didn't really believe. I felt like the African-Americans I knew were pretty much treated fairly by teachers, by our bosses at work. And I felt like racism just wasn't really a serious force in America anymore.

And when I was working on this book, I felt like, obviously, I mean, that's obviously not my perception, my perspective now. There were times when I was working on this book when I felt like I want to write a book that would have persuaded me when I was a teenager, that race still was really a powerful factor in shaping people's lives in America. Now, maybe a lot of your readers don't need to be persuaded of that. Maybe they already know. But I also think that, I think this book makes it makes it clear and explicit in a way that that not many stories really could because the links are so direct and so strong in this case i also think that um there's just not nearly enough awareness of of environmental racism and there's not enough literature about it and as i say because this story is so dramatic, because it's this riveting story about the last slave ship and the survivors, in a way, I felt like I

was baiting the hook. Like, I could get people to read about environmental racism in this case, because it's such a rich, dramatic narrative. So I think people should read it because it's i mean i think they'll find it gripping um the story itself is just is a gripping one uh but i think that it also fills a void of of um literature on on environmental racism and i hope readers will will um read it and and learn more about that definitely we can't change the future unless we understand the past the mistakes we made we can't correct them and what goes on and then and then uh you know it's it's sad a lot of the stuff that's happened in the course of our history but we need to look at it and go hey man we can do better we should do

better we hope we want to do better there's one other thought i've had about solutions about like what this what does this mean how does this cash out in terms of how we can change the future or you know or change the present how can we change what does this tell us about how we can affect change in the world and you mentioned those take far tank farms in africatown they to, there was a proposal to build these, this, all these petroleum tanks that are like, each one is like the size of a house.

They're huge. Uh, there are already some tank farms like that near the neighborhood. But at the same time, there was a proposal to build a pipeline through the main water supply for Southern Alabama, not just Africa town, but everybody.

Um, and lots of white people showed up when they heard about the pipeline going through the water supply. People believed that the tank farm in Africatown and the pipeline through the lake were connected. And so for the first time, all these white people felt like, like they started to sort of link arms with people in Africatown, because they felt like they had a shared interest here. They felt like each of them had something at stake. Like, Africatown didn't want the tank farms, and nobody wanted their water supply to be endangered. And one of my one of the central people in the book told me, I mean, Mobile was a pretty segregated city,

politically especially. He said that when these protesters went down to City Hall, black people and white people together, linking arms to say, we don't want this, that it was obvious that people in the city council were surprised. They'd never seen that before. They'd never seen that kind of thing in Mobile. He said you could see it in their eyes. And ultimately, they were successful in blocking those tank farms from

being built. And I think the takeaway is that what you have to do is try to create a like an interracial coalition that's not just based on white people's um pangs of conscience not just based on them wanting to do the right thing but to really like obtain a majority you know to get the kind of critical mass you need in a majoritarian democracy it has to be based on people's shared material interests. Um, that's what, you know, drives, I mean, a lot of the time anyway, sometimes it's culture wars, but a lot of the time that's what drives people to the polls. Um, it's, it's things like healthcare, it's things like, um, it's things like that, like schools, um, uh, it's, it's their, it's their, their, their paychecks and their health and the health of their children.

So I think that that's something we can learn from this story. There you go. I love what you said there. It's a great little vignette. You know, the common good of everyone, you know, unfortunately we live in a world where politics is used against us by politicians. Of course, we chose them. So you get the politicians you vote for.

But we live in this world of scarcity where, you know, we're told, oh, you know, if we help somebody else, it takes away from us. And really, when you study America in its early years, you know, the rising tide lifts all boats. I mean, that's the beauty of America. You know, it's the melting pot of the ideas and people and cultures and races and people from all walks of life that have made America great and have contributed in so many different ways. And so, you know, we need to, books like this help us understand that, you know, the rising tide lifts all boats. We need to help everybody because when everybody wins, we all win. When we live in this scarcity mindset, we're just sitting and fighting, clawing over scraps.

Meanwhile, billionaires are wandering off laughing or something. Yeah, that's the thing. I think you have to identify the actual malefactors, whether it was the railroad companies in the 1800s or, you know, or the oil companies and, you know, maybe the tech companies and the banks today. Like, it's not the people who have no power, like, you know, undocumented immigrants who are making your life worse. It's the people who control all the resources. So, yeah, it's very interesting. Well, wonderful to have you on the show.

GiveUsYour.com so people can have you on the, check you out on the interweb and get to know you better. For sure. It's NickTabor.com, T-A-B-O-R. There you go. Thanks, Nick, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Thank you. It's nicktabor.com. T-A-B-O-R. There you go. Thanks, Nick, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thanks to my audience for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com,

fortresschrisfoss, youtube.com, fortresschrisfoss, and all the other crazy places we are on the interwebs, LinkedIn, etc. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time. All right.