Survivors: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the Atlantic Slave Trade – Hannah Durkin in conversation with David Murray

On Sunday, 8 July 1860, nearly nine months to the day before a bloody four-year civil war put a halt to slavery as a legal institution in the United States, a two-masted schooner docked in secrecy near the mouth of Mobile Bay, Alabama. Concealed in its hold were 103 surviving captives from West Africa. Most were children and teenagers, and almost all were from the same Yoruba-speaking community in present-day south-west Nigeria, their town having been destroyed and their parents murdered by the Dahomey warriors who kidnapped and sold them.

The Clotilda was the last slave ship to bring captive Africans to the United States, and the last of its survivors lived until 1940. Yet the schooner was quickly burned, and no one was ever prosecuted for the crime of smuggling 110 young people across the Atlantic and into what was intended to be a life of slavery. The Clotilda’s existence was denied for decades, and its survivors were often deliberately silenced, even as the last of them endured as minor celebrities in Alabama’s major urban centres.

Survivors sheds new light on the Clotilda conspiracy and the identities and stories of its hidden captives. Establishing the Clotilda’s voyage as a crime of which future Confederate leaders had knowledge and even personal interests, and thus as a major event in the lead-up to secession and civil war, Hannah Durkin also shows how its survivors resisted their experiences of enslavement and transatlantic dislocation and battled to hold onto their West African identities. Most of the Clotilda’s survivors lived long enough to witness not just freedom, but also de jure segregation. The last of them contributed to the Harlem Renaissance and even the activist beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement.

Hannah Durkin is a historian specialising in transatlantic slavery and African diasporic art and culture. She holds an MA and PhD in American Studies from the University of Nottingham. Survivors: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the Atlantic Slave Trade (William Collins) won the 2025 Wolfson History Prize, the UK’s most prestigious history prize.

David Murray is Emeritus Professor in American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham.