She gave birth to two more mixed-race children during that period in Athens.Īfter her mother’s death in 1879, Matilda, now a mother of three in her early 20s, moved to Martin Station, Alabama with her children. The father was a white man, and given the prevalence of white male sexual violence toward black women and girls in the south at that time, the pregnancy may have been conceived in rape. Matilda gave birth to her first child, Eliza, at age 14 while living in Athens. Over the years, her surname evolved from “Creagh”-the name of her former enslaver-to “McCrear,” her preferred name. Since Gracie and Guy didn’t speak much English, young Matilda helped translate for her parents when they went to the local store. Her family-which now included her stepfather Guy, a fellow Clotilda survivor on Creagh’s plantation-settled in Athens, Alabama. Matilda was about seven when slavery ended. “To think that there’s still somebody alive today whose grandmother was on a slave ship…it’s really, I think, unique.” That means she was old enough to remember hearing her grandmother talk about her captivity on a slave ship, life in slavery and emancipation. Matilda’s granddaughter Eva Berry “was 12 when Matilda died,” Diouf says. According to the scholars' research, Matilda passed away in Selma, Alabama in 1940 at age 82. She is survived by a big family that includes living grandchildren. Diouf then revealed further information about Matilda for National Geographic. On March 19, Durkin published a paper in the journal Slavery & Abolition stating Matilda had lived even longer than Sally Smith.
The next year Hannah Durkin, a lecturer in literature and film of Newcastle University, identified Sally Smith, or Redoshi, as the last survivor because she died in 1937.ĭiouf identified another survivor, Matilda McCrear, in National Geographic’s February 2020 cover story. Public awareness of him rose in 2018 when Harper Collins released a previously unpublished interview that Zora Neale Hurston conducted with him. He lived in Africatown, a community of Clotilda survivors in Alabama, until 1935. Slave Ship Is Finally Identified in Alabamaįor a long time, scholars considered Cudjo Lewis, or Kossola, to be the last survivor.
That’s because this designation is always changing as new research emerges. Diouf, a visiting scholar at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice and author of Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America, doesn’t think it’s helpful to talk about people as being “the last” Clotilda survivor. When the Civil War ended five years later, she and her remaining family members were free, but they had no way to return home. On Creagh’s plantation, “Àbáké” became “Matilda,” later known as “Tilly.” Her mother became “Gracie” and her sister became “Sallie.” Her two oldest sisters went to another plantation, and she never saw them again. Once in Alabama, a prominent slaveowner named Memorable Walker Creagh purchased Àbáké, her mother and her 10-year-old sister to work on his plantation. READ MORE: Descendants of Last Slave Ship Still Live in Alabama Community slave ship (the importation of enslaved people had been illegal in the U.S. There, Captain William Foster and his crew illegally purchased her family and over 100 others to traffic into Alabama on the Clotilda, the last known U.S. Her given name was “Àbáké,” meaning “born to be loved by all.” She and her mother and sisters were captured from their home by the army of the Kingdom of Dahomey and taken to the slave port of Ouidah in present-day Benin. The facial scars on her left cheek-which are preserved in photographs-indicate she came from the Yoruba people of West Africa. By the time she died, Matilda had lived through the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, World War I, the Great Depression and the outbreak of World War II in Europe. When she first arrived in Alabama in 1860, she was only two years old. slave ship died in 1940-75 years after the abolition of slavery.
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