Two communities, separated by geography yet united by a shared spirit of self-determination, tell compelling stories of Black resilience and the pursuit of autonomy in the face of systemic oppression. These are Africatown, Alabama, and Mound Bayou, Mississippi.
Africatown, also known as AfricaTown USA and Plateau, is an historic community located three miles (5 km) north of downtown Mobile, Alabama. Mound Bayou, in the Mississippi Delta, is a town founded in 1887 by former slaves, with a vision that was revolutionary for its time.
Welcome to Africatown neighborhood sign
Mound Bayou: An Inverted Universe
Mound Bayou was designed from the start to be a self-reliant, autonomous, all-black community. Teddy Roosevelt proclaimed it "The Jewel of the Delta," and Booker T. Washington praised it as a model of "thrift and self-government." For decades, Mound Bayou thrived and prospered, becoming famous for empowering its black citizens. The town also became known as a haven from the virulent racism of the Jim Crow South.
"It's almost like it was an inverted or alternate universe, where being black was a positive thing," says Rolando Herts, director of the Delta Center for Culture and Learning at Delta State University.
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Back in 1887, the founders - freed slaves Isaiah T. Montgomery and his cousin, Benjamin T. Green - bought 840 acres of Mississippi swampland that was covered with dense hardwood forest. According to Booker T. Washington's account, published in 1907, Montgomery led the first small group of prospective black settlers there by train: "You see," he said, waving his hand in the direction of the forest, "this is a pretty wild place."
He paused, and the men looked hesitatingly in the direction he had indicated, but said nothing. "But this whole country," he continued, "was like this once. You have seen it change. You and your fathers have, for the most part, performed the work that has made it what it is. You and your fathers did this for some one else. Can't you do as much now for yourselves?"
The men picked up their axes and attacked the wilderness. It was back-breaking work, but they succeeded. Mound Bayou became prime cotton land, and word spread of the economic opportunity there. It was not the ordinary Negro farmer who was attracted to Mound Bayou colony. It was rather an earnest and ambitious class prepared to face the hardships of this sort of pioneer work. The scheme was widely advertised among the Negro farmers throughout the state and drew immigrants from all parts of Mississippi, and a certain number from other states.
As Herts tells me: "They wanted the best of the best. They wanted the most highly educated people who were entrepreneurial, who were going to come in and contribute something to making this community even more competitive, even better."
By the time Annyce Campbell was born in Mound Bayou in 1924, the town was thriving. "You name it, we had it!" she tells me proudly. The 92-year-old Campbell clearly recalls the heyday, when Mound Bayou was home to dozens of businesses, three cotton gins, a sawmill, a cottonseed oil mill, a bank - all of them black-owned. Mound Bayou boasted several schools, a train station, a Carnegie library.
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By 1942, Taborian Hospital opened, serving blacks from all over the Delta. Herts, of Delta State University, points out how revolutionary that was for the time: "Just being able to walk through the front door of a hospital and immediately receive the care that you need. Not having to go through a back door. Not having to wait for the white patrons to get their needs serviced first. That happened here in Mound Bayou."
But a drive through town today reveals a place that has fallen, hard. There are just a few businesses left: a convenience store, a gas station, a funeral home. The population is down below 1,500, a fraction of what it once was. More than half the children in Mound Bayou live below the poverty level.
So what happened? "I think desegregation happened," says Herts. "This is a case we've seen across the country in which black communities, people who had more options, left those communities to move to the suburbs, or to move to urban areas with more opportunities, and took their know-how and their resources with them."
Taborian Hospital is shuttered now. The home of Mound Bayou's founder, Isaiah Montgomery, is abandoned, its foundation cracked and crumbling. Montgomery and his co-founder, Benjamin Green, are buried in a small cemetery in town. Every year, people gather graveside for Founders' Day, with a memorial service and wreath-laying.
"It gives us an opportunity to pause and reflect on the founding of Mound Bayou," says Eulah Peterson, 68, who was born and raised in Mound Bayou. "This was certainly a big undertaking in 1887," Peterson continues. "We were, what, 32 years from slaves being freed. Some 130 years later, we're still here. While we're not where we'd like to be, we're still here."
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Eulah Peterson moved back to Mound Bayou once she retired, after spending nearly two decades away. "People said, 'Why are you going home to Mound Bayou?' and I said, it's because Mound Bayou is close enough to anything that I want to do and far enough away from anything I don't want to be bothered with."
Peterson is a former alderman and vice mayor, and is now running for mayor. I ask if it saddens her to think about what Mound Bayou used to be, and what it is now. "I would not necessarily say sad," she replies, "because I'm a realist. People are different, times are different, a sense of what was is not here. But," she adds, " I do feel that Mound Bayou will survive. Not necessarily the way it was, but maybe different and better in some ways."
Peterson envisions the Mound Bayou of the future as a retirement community, attracting more people who moved away but want to come home and help revive their hometown.
Clotilda mural on Bay Bridge Road near Peter Lee Street
Africatown: A Community Forged from the Ashes of the Clotilda
Africatown, community in Mobile, Alabama, that was established by survivors of the last forced voyage of enslaved Africans to the United States. It is the only American community ever created by West Africans who had personally survived the Middle Passage.
The last known slave ship | 60 Minutes Archive
The men and women who established Africatown arrived on the Clotilda in 1860. There is some dispute regarding where in western Africa the Clotilda survivors came from, but the leading theories are that most came from what is now either Benin or Nigeria. The majority were kidnapped from their towns or villages by representatives of Dahomey, a West African kingdom that sold many of its captives to European and American traders.
Upon their arrival in the United States, more than half of the 110 enslaved people on the Clotilda were forced to work for Timothy Meaher, the shipyard owner who had chartered the voyage, or for his brothers, on plantations outside of Mobile. Some of the others were sold to buyers who lived in upstate Alabama and perhaps farther away.
The Clotilda survivors who were living in the greater Mobile area were freed five years after their arrival, as the Civil War came to an end in April 1865 and Union forces entering Mobile began enforcing the Emancipation Proclamation (1863). Their first hope was to arrange for a ship to take them back to West Africa. But, over time, they resigned themselves to staying in the United States.
They found manual-labour jobs-for instance, cutting timber and making shingles-and saved from their wages until they could buy land in a remote part of Mobile county, some of which was purchased from the Meaher family. Their settlement, in which they autonomously appointed their own leaders and communicated in the languages of their homeland (such as Yoruba), came to be known as African Town, or the African Village.
By the turn of the 20th century the area was heavily populated, but the leaders of Mobile declined to bring it into the city limits. Basic municipal services like sewers and plumbing were not extended there until the 1960s. Lynchings near African Town surged in 1906 and 1907. A school for African American children, which would become known as the Mobile County Training School, opened there in 1910. Its founder was Isaiah J. Whitley, a young devotee of Booker T. Washington. After a fire in 1915, the school received funding from the Northern philanthropist Julius Rosenwald to build a new facility.
In the 1920s and ’30s, two massive paper mills opened near Plateau and Magazine Point, partly on land belonging to the Meaher family. Over the next several decades, thousands more people moved to the area for jobs, and the population grew exponentially. It was annexed into Mobile’s city limits in stages between 1945 and 1960.
By mid-century, the Clotilda story was not widely discussed in the neighbourhood, and some historians believed it was only a myth. But starting as early as the 1950s, a local welder named Henry C. Williams led a campaign for the area to get international recognition. It was Williams’s idea to bring back the original name (which he shortened to “AfricaTown”) and to promote the place as a heritage tourism destination.
In the 1980s a series of AfricaTown Folk Festivals brought Black celebrities, including the comedian Dick Gregory and the author Alex Haley, to the area-along with delegations of diplomats from western Africa. However, at the same time, the state of Alabama moved ahead with a plan to destroy the central business district and build a highway for industrial cargo there instead.
Historical records corroborate local claims that several of the homes demolished in this project had been built by Clotilda survivors. Williams died in 2008, and by then the efforts to promote Africatown’s history had mostly dwindled. But they were renewed by other activists in the 2010s and received a boost in 2019, when archaeologists announced that the wreckage of the Clotilda had been identified in the Mobile River delta.
Since 2007 the Clotilda and Africatown have been the subject of several books, and they were also featured in the 2022 Netflix documentary Descendant, which was presented by Higher Ground, the production company of Barack and Michelle Obama. In July 2023 the Africatown Heritage House opened in the neighbourhood, with plans for a visitor centre to follow.
Africatown Heritage House
Africatown Today
Over time, the surrounding area became increasingly industrialized, and many other Black Americans moved there. The descendants of the Clotilda survivors integrated into mainstream society. In the 21st century a version of the neighbourhood still survives, but it is ensconced by heavy industry. Many residents and allies hope to reverse its fortunes by transforming it into a destination for heritage tourism.
Africatown enshrines and preserves the indomitable spirit of our ancestors. That it continues to exist, validates the genius of its builders, the embodiment of their West African spirituality, intelligence, and skills. Thus, Africatown is an American ode to Africa, a symbol of resiliency in the face of slavery’s treachery. Africatown is an example of community-building in the 19th century and the Africatown International Design Idea Competition is a blueprint for its revitalization in the 21st century.
Africatown once consisted of 14 distinct neighborhoods-and then came the construction of the Interstate 165 bypass, the widening of Bay Bridge Road, and the loss of land through rezoning and industrial takeover. Since 1970, the number of neighborhoods has been cut mercilessly in half, leaving only memories of New Quarters, No Man’s Land, Tin Top Alley, Graveyard Alley, Pecan Orchard, Plum Orchard, and The Stockyard. Today’s Africatown comprises Hog Bayou, Plateau, Magazine Point, Green’s Alley (Slave Quarters), Happy Hills, Kelly Hills, and Lewis Quarters.
Proud Clotilda descendants and other current Africatown residents, who over the years have become advocates and activists for spatial justice, now have an incredible opportunity: to leverage the ship to tell their story, to rebuild their community, and to fund their many plans for the future that have been sitting on shelves for decades.
The Africatown Heritage Preservation Foundation, through a 2020 grant from the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, is poised to organize the community around these plans.
| Community | Founding | Founders | Key Features | Current Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mound Bayou | 1887 | Isaiah T. Montgomery, Benjamin T. Green | Self-reliant, autonomous, all-Black community; thriving economy; haven from Jim Crow South | Population decline; economic challenges; efforts to revitalize as a retirement community |
| Africatown | 1860 | Survivors of the Clotilda slave ship | Established by West Africans; retained customs and language; historic district; site of Clotilda discovery | Industrial encroachment; population decline; revitalization efforts through heritage tourism |
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