DOC Natives and Strangers: A History of Ethnic Americans by Leonard Dinnerstein; Roger L. Nichols; David M. Reimers in History

Description

Winner of the 2007 Wesley-Logan Prize of the American Historical Association; the 2009 G. Sulzby Award of the Alabama Historical Association and a 2008 finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; this acclaimed volume tells the moving story of the last recorded group of Africans deported to the United States as slaves--more than fifty years after the United States abolished the international slave trade. Sylviane A. Diouf reconstructs the lives of 110 men; women; and children from Benin and Nigeria who were brought ashore in Alabama in 1860 under cover of night; recounting their capture and passage in the slave pen in Ouidah; and describing their experience of slavery alongside American-born enslaved men and women. After emancipation; the group reunited from various plantations; bought land; and founded their own settlement; known as African Town. They ruled it according to customary African laws; spoke their own regional language and; when giving interviews; insisted that writers use their African names so that their families would know that they were still alive. African Town is still home to a community of Clotilda descendants.