The documentary “Descendant” follows the present-day descendants of the people enslaved on the Clotilda, the last known slave ship to enter the U.S., as they fight to preserve the stories of their ancestors in the face of historical erasure.
.’ ” The film is interspersed with excerpts from this interview, read by descendants in the places that Cudjo lived and worked. Publishers rejected Hurston’s manuscript, objecting to her choice to phonetically render his Black vernacular speech, a rich mix of Yoruba and English. The manuscript remained unpublished until 2018, the same year that Brown started shooting her film.
In 2019, marine scientists confirmed the discovery of the Clotilda’s remains, in a remote stretch of the Mobile river, near land belonging to the Meaher family. The discovery provided the Africatown community with scientific validation of their story. Following the find, Africatown held a bell-ringing ceremony attended by local politicians and members of national news outlets, including this reporter, who appears briefly in the documentary.
These attempts to grapple with what justice might mean resonate well beyond Africatown. People around the country, and the world, are watching to see how America’s history of racial violence will be memorialized. Sheila Flanagan, the former director of programs at the History Museum of Mobile, states that most African Americans, unlike the descendants of the Clotilda, don’t know where their African ancestors came from.
Stevenson, the civil-rights lawyer and founder of the national lynching memorial, addressed this problem by adding a second set of steel rectangles to the memorial, each one representing a U.S. county where lynchings took place. He invited the respective counties to claim their monuments and to establish a memorial on their home ground to lynching victims.
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