The Survivors of the Clotilda joins the ranks of Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Zora Neale Hurston’s rediscovered classic Barracoon, offering an immersive and revelatory history of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to land on US soil. This compelling narrative is told through the stories of its survivors—the final documented survivors of any slave ship—whose lives diverged and intersected in profound ways.

The Clotilda, the last slave ship to land on American soil, docked in Mobile Bay, Alabama, in July 1860—more than half a century after a federal law banned the importation of captive Africans, and nine months before the start of the Civil War. The last of its survivors lived well into the twentieth century, serving as the last witnesses to the final act of a significant and tragic period in world history.

In this epic work, Dr. Hannah Durkin tells the stories of the Clotilda’s 110 captives, drawing on intensive archival, historical, and sociological research. The Survivors of the Clotilda follows their lives from their kidnappings in modern-day Nigeria through a terrifying 45-day journey across the Middle Passage; from the subsequent sale of the ship’s 103 surviving children and young people into slavery across Alabama to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement in Selma; from the foundation of an all-Black African Town (later Africatown) in Northern Mobile—an inspiration for writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including Zora Neale Hurston—to the foundation of the quilting community of Gee’s Bend—a Black artistic circle whose cultural influence remains enormous.

An astonishing, deeply compelling tapestry of history, biography, and social commentary, The Survivors of the Clotilda is a tour de force that deepens our knowledge and understanding of the Black experience and of America and its tragic past.