MOBILE, Ala. — For decades, a handful of ancestors and neighborhood historians held down the legends of Africatown’s founding, recalling the stories of kidnapped people ripped from Africa and forced to make a new home in a strange land.

Last month, the Alabama Historical Commission (AHC) announced that a shipwreck discovered in the Mobile River Delta was almost certainly the Clotilda, a wooden vessel that carried 110 Africans to the United States in 1860, more than a half-century after the importation of slaves was declared illegal. Read Full Article