There are stories that refuse to die. Stories that cling to life with such desperate force that they outlive empires, laws, and even the people who tried to bury them. In 1860, when the last slave ship crossed the Atlantic Ocean and landed on American soil, it carried more than human cargo. It carried a secret so dangerous that powerful men would spend decades trying to erase it.
But one man remembered everything. His name was Kajou Lewis. And for 50 years after slavery ended, he kept silent. Not because he had forgotten, but because some truths are too heavy to speak aloud until the right moment arrives. This is the story of the last witness, the final survivor of a crime that was supposed to disappear into history.
A crime that involved wealthy merchants, corrupt officials, and a conspiracy that reached the highest levels of Alabama society. What Kojo saw, what he endured, and what he finally revealed would shake the foundations of everything America wanted to believe about itself. But the question that haunted him until his final days was simple and terrifying.
If he told the truth, would anyone believe him? Or worse, would they make sure he never spoke again? The Clatilda slipped into Mobile Bay undercover of darkness on a humid July night in 1860. Captain William Foster knew exactly what he was doing. The international slave trade had been illegal in the United States for 52 years.
Any ship caught importing enslaved Africans would be seized, its cargo freed, and its crew hanged. But Timothy Mir, one of the wealthiest ship builders in Mobile, Alabama, had made a bet, a reckless, arrogant wager born from whiskey and pride. At a dinner party months earlier, Miha had argued with northern visitors about states rights and federal overreach.
The conversation had grown heated as the northerners insisted that the slave trade was a relic of the past, that civilized nations had moved beyond such barbarism. “Me,” red-faced and furious, slammed his fist on the table. “I’ll bring a shipload of Africans right into Mobile Bay,” he declared. “And not a single federal marshall will touch me.
I’ll prove that southern power is absolute and that your federal laws are nothing but paper and empty threats.” The room fell silent. Some guests laughed nervously, assuming it was the Bourbon talking. But Timothy Mia never made idle threats. He was a man who had built his fortune through calculated risks and an unwavering belief in his own invincibility.
His brother James leaned forward, eyes gleaming with interest. “How much would such a venture cost?” he asked quietly. Within a week, the conspiracy was formed. Timothy and James Mir along with Burnsme and several other wealthy planters pulled together $35,000, an enormous sum in 1860. They hired Captain William Foster, a skilled sailor with a reputation for discretion and a willingness to bend the law for the right price.
The Clatilda was prepared for the voyage, its hold modified to carry human cargo, its papers falsified to show a legitimate trading mission to the Caribbean. Foster sailed from Mobile in March 1860, crossing the Atlantic with a crew of 12 men who had been carefully selected for their loyalty and their silence.
The journey to West Africa took 6 weeks. When they arrived at the port of Weda in the Kingdom of Day, Foster made contact with local slave traders who served King Glale. The kingdom of Deaomi was one of the most powerful states in West Africa, and King Glaw maintained his power through constant warfare with neighboring kingdoms. Prisoners of war were Dehomiey’s most valuable export, and the king’s warriors were legendary for their brutality and efficiency.
Foster didn’t care about the politics or the history. He cared only about filling his ship’s hold and returning to Mobile before federal authorities caught wind of the operation. 110 people were purchased for $9,000 in gold. They came from various ethnic groups, Euroba, Fawn, and others captured during raids on villages throughout the region.
Among them was a young man named Olu Kosola, barely 19 years old, who would later be known as Kujo Lewis. Kujo’s village of Bonte had been prosperous and peaceful. His father was a respected member of the community, a man who settled disputes and advised younger men on matters of farming and family.
Kujo had been training to follow in his father’s footsteps, learning the traditions and responsibilities that would one day be his. He had sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, a network of family that stretched through the village like roots through soil. The morning of the raid, Kujo had been working in the fields with his father and older brother.
They heard the drums first, not the familiar rhythms of celebration or ceremony, but urgent frantic beats that meant only one thing, danger. By the time they reached the village, smoke was already rising from burning homes. The Domi warriors had struck a dawn when most people were still waking when defenses were at their weakest.
Kojo’s father pushed him toward the forest, shouting for him to run, to hide, to survive. But Kojo hesitated, looking back to see his mother and sisters. That hesitation cost him everything. A warrior grabbed him, struck him across the head with the flat of a machete, and he fell into darkness. When he woke, he was chained by the neck to a line of other captives.
His head throbbed with pain and blood had dried on his face. He called out for his family, but no one answered. The warriors marched them for six days, stopping only briefly for water and a handful of food. Those who couldn’t keep pace were beaten. Those who collapsed were left behind to die. At the coast, Kujo saw the ocean for the first time in his life. It stretched endlessly.
A vast expanse of water that seemed to swallow the sky and anchored in the harbor was the Cloatilda, a ship that would carry him away from everything he had ever known. The middle passage took 45 days. 110 people were packed into a hold designed for cargo, not human beings. They were chained in rows, unable to stand, barely able to move.
The air was thick with the smell of sweat, vomit, and human waste. Disease spread quickly in the cramped, filthy conditions. Several people died during the voyage, their bodies thrown overboard without ceremony. Kajou would never speak in detail about those weeks. When asked later in life, he would shake his head and say only, “It was a terrible time.
I do not like to remember, Moo.” But the scars on his wrists and ankles told part of the story. The nightmares that woke him screaming for decades afterward told another part. Some experiences are too traumatic to put into words, too painful to revisit even in memory. When the Cloatilda finally reached American waters in early July 1860, Captain Foster faced a critical problem.
Federal authorities in Mobile had heard rumors about Timothy Mike’s boast. Revenue cutters were patrolling the bay and customs officials were on high alert. Foster couldn’t simply sail into port and unload his illegal cargo. He needed a plan. Foster anchored the CLA in a remote section of Mobile Bay, far from the main shipping channels.
Undercover of darkness, he transferred the captives to a riverboat owned by Burns Mihar. The operation took hours with terrified, confused people being moved from one vessel to another while armed men shouted orders in a language they didn’t understand. Once the transfer was complete, Foster made a decision that would hide the evidence of his crime for more than a century and a half.
He ordered that Clatilda stripped of anything valuable, then set it on fire. As flames consumed the ship, Foster and his crew watched from the riverboat. When the fire had done its work, they towed the burning hulk into a remote bayou and let it sink into the dark water. The physical evidence of the crime disappeared beneath the surface, leaving only the human witnesses, witnesses who spoke no English and had no legal standing in American society.
The captives were taken up river to a swampy isolated area north of Mobile. There, hidden in the dense cane breaks and cypress swamps, they were kept in makeshift camps while the Mia brothers decided how to distribute their illegal property. For weeks, the Africans lived in a state of terrified confusion.
They didn’t know where they were, didn’t understand what was happening, and had no way to communicate with their captives beyond gestures and desperate attempts at pantomime. Timothy Mia visited the camp several times, walking among the captives like a farmer inspecting livestock. He pointed at individuals, making notes in a ledger, dividing them up among his family and business associates.
Kajou and about 30 others were assigned to work on the Miha plantation. They were given new names, simple, easy names that white overseers could pronounce. Ola Lola became Kio, a name that meant nothing to him, that carried none of the history and identity his real name represented. The Africans were issued rough clothing shown to crude cabins and put to work.
But unlike enslaved people born in America who had been conditioned from birth to accept their bondage, the Clutilda survivors remembered freedom. They remembered their real names, their languages, their families, their villages. They had been whole people with complete lives, and those memories made them dangerous. The Mia brothers understood this danger.
They kept the new arrivals separated from other enslaved workers as much as possible. They instructed overseers to punish any attempts at teaching the Africans English beyond the bare minimum needed for work. They spread rumors throughout Mobile that these were enslaved people purchased legally from plantations in Georgia and South Carolina, brought to Alabama before the war made such transactions impossible.
And they waited, waited for the scandal to fade, for people to stop asking questions, for the federal authorities to give up their investigation. The Mia were confident that their wealth and political connections would protect them. They were pillars of mobile society, respected businessmen, leaders in the community.
Who would believe the word of illiterate Africans against theirs? But history, as it often does, had other plans. Within a year of the Clatilda’s arrival, the political situation in America exploded. South Carolina seceded from the Union in December 1860. By February 1861, six more southern states had followed, including Alabama. The Confederate States of America was formed, and by April, the nation was at war. Timothy Mr.
threw himself into the Confederate cause with the same arrogant confidence he’d shown in making his bet. He believed the South would win quickly, that northern industrial power was no match for southern fighting spirit and British support. He converted his shipyards to produce vessels for the Confederate navy.
He invested heavily in Confederate bonds. He sent his sons to fight in the army, certain they would return as heroes of a victorious new nation. For four years, the war raged. Kujo and the other Clatilda survivors worked the Miha plantation, growing food for the Confederate war effort, maintaining the property while white men went off to fight.
They heard rumors of Union victories, of enslaved people escaping to freedom behind northern lines, of a proclamation that declared them free. But in rural Alabama, far from the battlefields, those rumors seemed like distant dreams. Then in April 1865, everything changed. Union troops occupied Mobile. The Confederacy collapsed and suddenly, impossibly, KJO Lewis and the other survivors of the Clatilda were told they were free.
But what did freedom mean for someone who spoke limited English, had no money, no land, no family in America, and was living proof of a federal crime committed by men who still held enormous power in Alabama. That question would define the rest of Kajou’s life, and the answer would be far more complicated and dangerous than anyone could have imagined.
Freedom came to Kajou Lewis not with celebration but with confusion and fear when Union soldiers arrived at the Mihar plantation in April 1865. They gathered all the enslaved people and read from a document that declared them free. The words meant little to Kujo who still struggled with English. But the reactions of the overseers, the shock, the anger, the barely concealed rage told him that something fundamental had changed.
The Union officer in charge, a young lieutenant from Massachusetts, tried to explain their options. They could stay and work for wages. They could leave and seek employment elsewhere. They could try to return to their homes. Though he admitted that for those born in Africa, such a journey was impossible. The officer meant well, but his words revealed a profound misunderstanding of their situation.
What did wages mean to people who had never handled money? Where could they go when they knew nothing of American geography? How could they return to villages that might no longer exist, to families who might be dead or scattered? Timothy Mia, meanwhile, was facing his own crisis. The Confederacy had lost. His investments in Confederate bonds were worthless.
His shipyards had been damaged during the Union occupation. His sons had returned from the war, one missing an arm, another suffering from what would later be called shell shock. The world he had known, the system that had made him wealthy and powerful was collapsing around him. But Mia was a survivor. He understood that the war might be over.
But the struggle for power in the south was just beginning. And he recognized that the Clatilda survivors represented both a threat and an opportunity. The threat was obvious. They were living evidence of a federal crime. If federal prosecutors decided to make an example of someone if they wanted to show that the law applied even to wealthy white southerners. Snorts.
The Clatilda case would be perfect. The crime was clear. The evidence was undeniable and the penalty execution would send a powerful message. Mi knew that in the chaotic early days of reconstruction with federal troops occupying the South and radical Republicans pushing for harsh punishment of Confederate leaders, he was vulnerable.
But Mia also saw an opportunity. The Africans needed land, needed a place to build their lives. And Miha owned thousands of acres of worthless swamp land along the Mobile River. Land that was too wet for farming, too remote for development, too mosquitoinfested for anyone to want. If he could convince the Africans to settle there, he could accomplish several goals at once.
Keep them close where he could monitor them, bind them to him through debt, and create the appearance of benevolence that might protect him from prosecution. Within weeks of the war’s end, Mihar approached the Clootilda survivors with a proposal. He would sell them parcels of land, 2 acres per family, at what he claimed was a fair price.
They could pay overtime, working for wages on his remaining properties or in his shipyards with their earnings going toward the land debt. To people who had nothing, who desperately wanted to recreate some version of the communities they’d lost, it seemed like a miracle. Kujo was among those who accepted. He was 24 years old, strong and healthy, and determined to build a life in this strange new country.
He had met a woman named Abila, another Clatilda survivor who had been renamed Sally by her enslavers. She was from a different village, spoke a different dialect, but they shared the bond of the middle passage and the desperate need to create family in a place where they had none. They married in a ceremony that blended what they could remember of their African traditions with the Christian rituals they’d been forced to learn.
Together, Kujo and Abila began to build. They cleared land, cutting through thick underbrush and draining standing water. They built a small cabin using techniques Kajjo remembered from Bonte, adapted to the materials available in Alabama. They planted a garden with vegetables and herbs, some familiar from Africa, others knew, and they joined with other Clatilda survivors to create a community.
The settlement that would become known as Africa Town, took shape slowly over the next several years. About 30 families of Clatilda survivors clustered together along the Mobile River. Their homes arranged in patterns that echoed African village layouts. They spoke their native languages, Yoruba primarily, but also Fawn and others, creating a linguistic island in the American South.
They practiced what they could remember of their traditions, adapted what they had to forget, and created something new, a hybrid culture that was neither fully African nor fully American. But the land deal that had seemed like salvation revealed itself to be another form of bondage. The prices Miha charged were inflated far beyond the land’s actual value.
The interest rates were and the wages he paid for work were barely enough to cover basic necessities, let alone make significant payments on the debt. Kujo and the others found themselves trapped in a cycle that would take decades to escape. Working constantly, earning little, always owing more. And beneath the economic exploitation lay a more insidious form of control, fear.
Timothy Mia and his brothers began a quiet but relentless campaign to ensure the Clatilda survivors stayed silent about the ship and the circumstances of their arrival in America. The message was delivered through intermediaries, overseers, foremen, white workers who had connections to the Mia family. It was never explicit, never written down, but it was unmistakable.
Speaking about the Clatilda would bring trouble. The threat took many forms. Sometimes it was economic. Mr. Miher might have to call in those land debts if people start spreading stories. Sometimes it was legal. Federal authorities might decide to deport anyone who was brought here illegally. Sometimes it was more direct.
Accidents happen to people who don’t know when to keep their mouth shut. Kujo understood the game being played. He had seen how power worked in Domi where King Gllay maintained control through a combination of rewards and threats. The Mahairs were using the same tactics. They gave just enough land wages the appearance of freedom to make people hesitant to risk losing it.
And they created just enough fear to keep people from speaking out. The 1870s brought new challenges and new dangers. Reconstruction was in full swing. And for a brief moment, it seemed like real change might be possible. Black men could vote. Black politicians were elected to local and state offices. Schools were open for black children.
Federal troops enforced the new laws, protecting black citizens from violence and intimidation. Kajjo watched these developments with cautious hope. He learned to read and write, attending classes taught by northern missionaries who had come south to educate the formerly enslaved. He registered to vote, casting his ballot in elections for the first time in his life.
He attended political meetings where black and white Republicans discussed plans for rebuilding the South on principles of equality and justice. But he also saw the backlash. White supremacist groups, the Ku Klux Clan, the White League, the Red Shirts, launched campaigns of terror against black communities. They burned schools and churches.
They murdered black politicians and voters. They attacked anyone, black or white, who supported reconstruction policies. The violence was systematic, organized, and designed to send a clear message. Black political participation would not be tolerated. In 1874, Kujo witnessed an event that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
A black man named Samuel Johnson, who had been elected to the Mobile City Council, was found dead on the road between Africa Town and Mobile. The official story was that he’d been killed by robbers. But everyone knew the truth. Johnson had been murdered because he’d spoken out against the mere family’s business practices, including their exploitation of black workers.
No one was arrested. No investigation was conducted. The message was clear. Even elected officials weren’t safe if they challenged white power. Kujo attended Johnson’s funeral. Standing in the back of the church, listening to the preacher talk about martyrdom and justice. But what Kajjo heard beneath the words was a warning.
This could happen to anyone who speaks too loudly. By 1877, reconstruction was effectively over. Federal troops withdrew from the South. White supremacist governments reclaimed power throughout the region. The brief window of black political participation slammed shut. new laws. The Black Codes, later replaced by Jim Crow legislation, stripped away voting rights, segregated public spaces, and created a system of legal discrimination that would last for nearly a century.
The Mihar family, far from being prosecuted for their crime, grew even wealthier and more powerful. Timothy Miho expanded his business interests, investing in railroads, lumber mills, and real estate. He became a respected figure in mobile society. His past conveniently forgotten by white citizens who benefited from his economic influence.
When he died in 1892, his obituary in the mobile register praised him as a pioneer businessman and pillar of the community. The Clutilda was not mentioned. Kajou and Abila meanwhile were raising a family. Their first child, Alec, was born in 1866, James followed in 1868, then Kajou Jr. in 1870, Polly in 1872, David in 1875, and finally Celia in 1878.
Six children born free in America who would never know the horrors their parents had endured but would inherit the consequences. Kajou worked constantly to provide for his family. He labored on the docks, loading and unloading ships. He worked in lumber mills, cutting timber from the forests around Mobile.
He did odd jobs for white families, repairing fences, building sheds, whatever would earn a few dollars. Aya took in laundry, washed clothes for white families, and sold vegetables from their garden. Together they slowly, painfully paid down the debt on their land. But Kujo also made time to teach his children about their heritage.
In the evenings after work, he would gather them around and tell stories about Bonte. He taught them words in Euroba, though he knew they would never be fluent. He explained the traditions of his people, the values that had guided his life before the Clutilda. He wanted them to know where they came from, even if he couldn’t tell them the full truth of how they’d arrived in America.
The children grew up straddling two worlds. At home, they heard African languages and stories. In the wider world, they faced the harsh realities of being black in Jim Crow Alabama. They attended segregated schools with handme-down textbooks and underpaid teachers. They learned to navigate the complex rules of racial etiquette.
Never look a white person directly in the eye. Always step off the sidewalk when a white person approaches. Never question or challenge white authority. Kujo watched his children navigate these dangers with a mixture of pride and heartbreak. They were adapting, surviving, finding ways to live in a hostile world. But he also saw how the system was crushing their spirits, limiting their possibilities, teaching them to accept injustice as normal.
He wondered sometimes if he had made the right choice in accepting Mir’s land deal in staying in Alabama rather than trying to go elsewhere. But where else could they have gone? And would it have been any different? Then tragedy struck and struck again and kept striking until Kujo felt like he was being punished by forces beyond his understanding.
In 1893, their daughter Celia fell ill with a fever. She was only 15 years old, bright and beautiful with her mother’s smile and her father’s determination. Kajou and Isla tried everything. Home remedies, prayers, a white doctor who charged them a week’s wages for a brief examination. Nothing worked. Celia died on a hot August night, her body burning with fever, her parents helpless beside her bed.
The grief nearly destroyed them. Aila stopped speaking for weeks, moving through the house like a ghost. Kujo threw himself into work, laboring until exhaustion made thought impossible. They buried Celia in the small cemetery the Africa town community had established, marking her grave with a wooden cross that Kujo carved himself.
3 years later, in 1896, their son David was killed. The circumstances were murky, the details contradictory, but the outcome was brutally clear. David had been working at a sawmill when he got into an argument with a white co-orker. The argument escalated. The white man struck David. David, young and angry and tired of swallowing insults, struck back.
That night, David didn’t come home. Kujo went looking for him, searching the roads between the sawmill and Africa Town, calling his son’s name into the darkness. He found David’s body at dawn, lying in a ditch beside the road. He had been beaten to death. Kajjo carried his son’s body home, walking the three miles with David’s weight in his arms.
Neighbors came out of their houses, saw what had happened, and wept. Everyone knew what this meant. Everyone understood that there would be no justice, no investigation, no consequences for the murderers. Kojo wanted to go to the sheriff, wanted to demand that someone be held accountable. But the elders of Africa Town stopped him.
You go to the sheriff, they said, and they’ll find a reason to arrest you. They’ll say David started it. Say he attacked a white man. Say you’re causing trouble. You’ll end up dead or in prison. And Aya will lose her husband and her son. So Kujo buried David next to Celia. Carved another wooden cross and swallowed his rage. But something broke inside him that day.
He had survived the middle passage, survived slavery, survived 50 years of dangerous freedom. But watching his children die, unable to protect them, unable to seek justice, that was a different kind of death. The worst blow came in 1902. Kajjo Jr. um their third child and namesake was working for the Louisville and Nashville Railroad.
He was a breakman, a dangerous job that required him to couple and uncouple train cars often while they were moving. On a cold February morning, something went wrong. Kajjo Jr. was crushed between two cars. The railroad claimed it was his fault, said he’d been careless, said he’d violated safety procedures.
They denied any compensation to the family. When Kajjo senior tried to pursue the matter, the railroads lawyers threatened to sue him for defamation and harassment. The message was clear. Accept the loss and move on or lose everything. Kajjo was 61 years old. He had now buried three of his six children.
Isa’s health was failing, her spirit broken by repeated grief, and Kujo found himself facing a question that had haunted him since the day the Clatilda landed in Mobile Bay. What was the point of survival if everything you built could be taken away? But even in his darkest moments, Kujo held on to something. Memory. He remembered Bonte, remembered his father’s teachings, remembered the values that had guided his people for generations.
And he realized that if he died without speaking, if he let the mere succeed in burying the truth, then his children’s deaths would be meaningless. The Clatilda would be forgotten, the crime erased, and the next generation would never know what had been done to them. So Kujo made a decision. He would wait for the right moment, the right person, the right opportunity, and when it came, he would tell the truth.
All of it, no matter the consequences, he just had to survive long enough to find someone who would listen. The early years of the 20th century brought both change and continuity to Africa Town. The community had grown with children and grandchildren of the original Clatilda survivors, creating a vibrant, tight-knit neighborhood.
They had built churches, established mutual aid societies, and created institutions that served their needs in a segregated society. But they also faced increasing pressure from the industrial development spreading along the Mobile River. Factories and shipyards encroached on Africa towns borders. The air grew thick with smoke and chemical smells.
The river, once a source of fish and fresh water, became polluted with industrial waste. White-owned businesses bought up land around the community, squeezing it into an ever smaller area. The pattern was familiar to anyone who understood how power worked in the south. Make life difficult enough, and eventually people would leave, freeing up the land for more profitable uses.
Kujo watched these developments with weary recognition. He was in his 60s now, his body worn from decades of hard labor. His wife Isa’s health continued to decline. She suffered from what doctors called melancholia, what we would now recognize as severe depression brought on by repeated trauma and loss. She spent much of her time sitting in their small house, staring out the window, occasionally speaking in Euroba to people who weren’t there.
Kujo cared for her as best he could, but he also had to keep working. The debt on their land was finally paid off, but they still needed money for food, medicine, and basic necessities. He took whatever jobs he could find, though employers were increasingly reluctant to hire older black workers when younger men were available for less money.
In 1908, Abila died. She was 67 years old, and she had spent 43 years in America without ever seeing her homeland again. Hujo buried her next to their children in the small cemetery that now held so many of Africa towns dead. He carved her headstone himself, writing her name in both English and Yoraba. Abila Seely, wife and mother gone home.
After Abila’s death, Kujo lived alone. His surviving children, Alec, James, and Polly, had families of their own and lived nearby. But Kujo preferred solitude. He spent his days tending his garden, repairing his house, and sitting on his porch, watching the world change around him. Neighbors would stop by to check on him, bring him food, ask if he needed anything.
He was grateful for their concern, but he also felt increasingly isolated. He was one of the last Clatilda survivors still alive, and the weight of memory was becoming unbearable. In 1914, something unexpected happened. A young black woman named Emma Langden Roach came to Africa Town. She was a writer and historian interested in documenting the stories of formerly enslaved people before they were lost forever.
She had heard rumors about the CLA and wanted to know if they were true. Kujo agreed to speak with her, though he was cautious. He told her about his life in Bante, about the raid and the middle passage, about the years of slavery and the complicated decades of freedom. But when she asked specific questions about the Clatilda who had brought them, how they had arrived, what had happened to the ship, Kujo became evasive.
“It was a long time ago,” he said. “My memory is not so good anymore.” Raj was persistent. She interviewed other Africa town residents, pieced together fragments of the story, and eventually published a book in 1914 called Historic Sketches of the South. In it, she included a chapter about the Clotilda and its survivors. It was the first time the story appeared in print, and it created a small stir locally.
The Mia family’s response was swift and coordinated. They issued statements calling the book sensationalized fiction and questioning Rash’s sources. They pointed out inconsistencies in the accounts. Different people remembered different details. Dates didn’t always match. Some elements seemed exaggerated. They suggested that Rash had been taken in by tall tales and folklore, that she had confused legend with fact.
The campaign was effective. Newspapers in Mobile published articles questioning the book’s accuracy. Historians dismissed it as unreliable and within a few years historic sketches of the South was largely forgotten, relegated to the category of interesting but unverified local law. Kujo read about the controversy with a mixture of frustration and resignation.
He had told Rash the truth, or at least part of it, but he had also held back, afraid of what might happen if he spoke too openly. And now the MS had successfully discredited the story, making it seem like fantasy rather than documented fact. The pattern was depressingly familiar. The powerful control, the narrative, and the powerless watch their truths be erased.
But Kojo also noticed something interesting. Despite the Mihar’s efforts to discredit the book, people kept asking questions. Journalists would occasionally come to Africa Town looking for the old African man who had supposedly been brought on the last slave ship. Historians wrote letters asking for interviews. Even some white residents of Mobile expressed curiosity about the story.
The questions made Kujo think. Maybe the time wasn’t right yet, but maybe it would come. Maybe there would be someone who would listen, really listen, and have the skill and credibility to tell the story in a way that couldn’t be dismissed or discredited. He just had to stay alive long enough to find that person.
The years passed slowly. World War I came and went, barely touching Africa Town except for the young men who went to fight and sometimes didn’t come back. The 1920s brought economic prosperity to some parts of America, but not to black communities in the south. Africa Town remained poor, isolated, and increasingly surrounded by industrial development that brought pollution, but no jobs for local residents.
Kojo was in his 80s now, moving slowly, his vision failing, his hearing diminished, but his mind remained sharp, and his memory was perfect. He could still recall every detail of Bonte, could still hear his father’s voice, could still feel the weight of chains on his wrists during the middle passage.
The memories hadn’t faded. If anything, they had become more vivid as other aspects of his life receded. Then, in the spring of 1927, a woman named Zora Neil Hursten came to Afric. Hursten was unlike anyone Kajjo had ever met. She was a young black woman educated at Barnard College in New York, studying anthropology under the famous France Boas.
She was researching African-American folklore and culture, traveling through the South with a notebook, a camera, and an insatiable curiosity. She had heard about Africa Town from other researchers, and she was determined to document the stories of the Clatilda survivors before they were lost forever. When Hursten knocked on Kojo’s door, he was initially suspicious.
He’d spoken to journalists and researchers before, and the experience had rarely been positive. They usually wanted exotic stories about Africa, wanted to hear about savage customs and primitive beliefs, wanted to treat him like a curiosity rather than a person. But Hursten was different from the first moment she spoke. Mr. Lewis, she said, I’m here to listen to your story, not the story white people want to hear, but your story in your own words told the way you want to tell it.
I’m here to write it down exactly as you say it to preserve your voice and your truth. And I promise you that I will do everything in my power to make sure the world hears what you have to say. Kujo looked at her for a long moment, studying her face, trying to gauge her sincerity.
He had been waiting for this moment for more than 60 years, waiting for someone he could trust with the full truth. Was this young woman the one? Come in, he said finally. Sit down. I will tell you everything. Over the next several months, Hursten visited Kajjo regularly. She would arrive in the morning, notebook in hand, and sit on his porch or in his small living room.
Kajou would talk, sometimes for hours, speaking in a mixture of English and Euroba, occasionally pausing to find the right words or to compose himself when memories became too painful. Hursten was a skilled interviewer. She didn’t interrupt, didn’t push for sensational details, didn’t try to shape the narrative to fit preconceived ideas.
She simply listened, asked clarifying questions, and wrote down everything Kujo said. She also took photographs. Kujo standing in front of his house holding tools, tending his garden, sitting in his rocking chair on the porch. Kujo told her everything. He described his childhood in Bante in vivid detail, the layout of the village, the daily routines, the ceremonies and celebrations, the social structures, and family relationships.
He talked about his father’s teachings, the values that had guided his people, the sense of belonging and purpose that had defined his early life. He described the raid with painful clarity, the sound of drums, the smoke, the screams, the moment when his father pushed him toward the forest and he hesitated, the blow that knocked him unconscious.
He talked about waking up in chains, about the march to the coast, about seeing the ocean for the first time and the ship that would carry him away from everything he knew. The middle passage was the hardest part to discuss. Kujo would sometimes stop mid-sentence, his face contorting with remembered pain, his hands trembling.
Hursten would wait patiently, not pushing, letting him take his time. When he could continue, Kujo would speak in short clipped sentences describing the darkness, the chains, the smell, the sounds of people dying around him. He talked about arriving in Mobile Bay, about the burning of the clot, about being hidden in the swamps while the Mia her brothers decided what to do with their illegal cargo.
He described the years of slavery, the confusion of freedom, the land deal that had seemed like salvation, but turned out to be another form of bondage. And he talked about his children, their births, their lives, their deaths. This was perhaps the most painful part of all, more painful even than the middle passage because these were losses that still felt fresh, wounds that had never healed.
When Kajjo spoke about burying Celia, David and Kajou Jr., and tears ran down his weathered face, and his voice broke with grief that was as raw as the day it had happened. But Kujo also revealed something that Hursten hadn’t expected. He was still afraid. Even at 86 years old, even with most of the mere brothers dead, even with slavery abolished for more than 60 years, he was afraid of what would happen if he spoke too loudly.
“They don’t want us talk about the ship,” Kujo told Hursten. “They say it make trouble. They say we should forget, move on, not stir up old problems. But how can I forget? How can I move on when I remember everything?” When I close my eyes, I see my father’s face. I hear my mother’s voice. I smell the smoke from our burning village.
How do you forget that? Hursten asked him why he was afraid. What specifically he thought might happen. Kajjo<unk>’s answer was both simple and devastating. The Maya her family still own most of the land around here. He said they still have power, still have friends in government, still have ways of making life difficult for people who cause trouble.
And I still live on land I bought from them. My children live here. My grandchildren live here. If I speak too loud, if I make them angry, what happens to my family after I’m gone? It was a question that revealed the fundamental nature of power and oppression. Even after slavery ended, even after legal equality was supposedly established, the mechanisms of control remained.
Economic dependence, social pressure, the threat of violence. These tools were just as effective as chains and whips, and in some ways more insidious because they were harder to see and harder to fight. But Kujo also told Hursten something else. I am old now. I have lived longer than I ever thought I would.
I have seen my children and grandchildren grow. I have paid off my land debt. I have built a life here, even though it is not the life I would have chosen. And I want the truth to be known before I die. I want people to understand what was done to us, not just by the Meyers, but by a whole system that allowed it to happen and then tried to pretend it never did.
Uran promised to tell his story to make sure the world knew what had happened. She took photographs of Kujo standing in front of his house holding tools tending his garden. In one particularly striking image, Kajjo stands straight despite his age, looking directly at the camera with an expression that is both dignified and defiant.
His eyes seem to look through the lens through time directly at future viewers, demanding to be seen and heard. Hursten also interviewed other CLA survivors still living in Africa Town. There were only a handful left by then. Paulie Allen, Osaki, a few others. Each had their own story, their own memories, their own perspective on what had happened.
Hursten documented all of them, creating a comprehensive record of the Clutilda and its survivors. When Hursten finished her research and returned to New York, she wrote a book based on her interviews with Kajou. She titled it Barakan, using the term for the holding pens where enslaved Africans were kept before being loaded onto ships.
The manuscript was powerful, raw, and unflinching. It presented Kadujo’s story in his own words, preserving his voice and his perspective without filtering it through academic language or literary conventions. But when Hursten tried to publish the book, she ran into a wall. Publishers in the late 1920s and early 1930s weren’t interested in a story about the illegal slave trade told from an African perspective.
They wanted stories that fit comfortable narratives about the Old South, about reconciliation and progress, about how far America had come since the bad old days of slavery. Kujo’s story was too raw, too accusatory, too uncomfortable. Some publishers objected to Hursten’s decision to preserve Kujo’s dialect rather than translating it into standard English.
They said it made the book hard to read, that it would limit its audience. But Hursten refused to change it. Preserving Kajjo’s voice exactly as he spoke was essential to the integrity of the story. To translate it into standard English would be to erase him again to make him fit into white expectations rather than presenting him as he truly was.
Other publishers were more direct about their concerns. The Miha family was still prominent in Alabama. The story made respected southern businessmen look like criminals. It raised uncomfortable questions about how many other respected families had built their wealth through illegal and immoral means. It challenged the narrative of southern honor and nobility that was being actively promoted through books, movies, and popular culture.
One publisher told Hursten bluntly, “This book would cause too much trouble. It would offend too many people. It would open old wounds that are better left closed. Why can’t you write something more uplifting? Something that shows how far we’ve come rather than dwelling on the past.” Hursten tried multiple publishers over several years, but the answer was always the same. No.
Frustrated and eventually moving on to other projects, she would go on to write Their Eyes Were Watching God and other celebrated works. Hursten put the Barracon manuscript in a drawer. It would remain unpublished for nearly 90 years. Meanwhile, back in Africa Town, Cojo Lewis continued his quiet life.
He tended his garden, repaired his house, and sat on his porch, watching the world change around him. Neighbors would stop by to visit and Kujo would tell them stories about Africa, about the old days, about the people who had come on the Clutilda. He became a living link to a past that was rapidly disappearing, a keeper of memories that no one else could preserve.
But Kujo also felt the weight of time pressing down on him. He was in his 90s now, one of the oldest people in Africa Town. His body was failing, his strength diminishing. He knew he didn’t have much time left and he worried about what would happen to the story after he was gone. Hursten had promised to publish it, but years had passed and nothing had appeared.
Would the truth die with him after all? In the summer of 1935, Kujo’s health took a sharp decline. He developed pneumonia and his weakened body couldn’t fight it off. His children and grandchildren gathered around his bed, holding his hands, speaking softly to him in English, and the fragments of Yoruba they remembered.
Kujo drifted in and out of consciousness, sometimes speaking in English, sometimes in his native language, sometimes mixing the two. In his final moments, witnesses said Kujo spoke in Yorba, calling out names that no one recognized. His father, his mother, his siblings from Bonte. He seemed to be seeing people who weren’t there, reaching out to touch faces that only he could see.
And then, peacefully, he died. It was July 17th, 1935. Kujo Lewis was 94 years old. He was the last survivor of the Clatilda, the last person who had been born in Africa and brought to America as a slave. With his death, a direct link to that history was severed. No one alive would ever again be able to say, “I remember Africa.
I remember the middle passage.” I remember slavery from personal experience. Kujo’s funeral was held at the Union Baptist Church in Africa Town. Hundreds of people attended, family, neighbors, people from throughout Mobile who had heard of the old African man and wanted to pay their respects. The preacher spoke about Kujo<unk>’s long life, his strength, his faith, his dedication to family and community.
He talked about Kajou as a bridge between two worlds, a man who had never forgotten where he came from, but who had also built a life in the place where he’d been forced to stay. Local newspapers ran obituaries noting Kajjo’s passing. The mobile register called him the last survivor of the last slave ship, though the article was brief and focused more on his age than on the circumstances of his arrival.
The Birmingham News ran a slightly longer piece calling Kajjo a living link to a bygone era and a curiosity of history. None of the obituaries mentioned the Clutilda by name. None of them identified Timothy Mia or his brothers as the men who had brought Kajou to America. None of them called what had happened a crime or suggested that anyone should be held accountable.
The story was presented as a sad but distant piece of history. Interesting, but not particularly relevant to the present. The Mia family by then in its third and fourth generation said nothing publicly about Kujo’s death. But privately, they must have felt a sense of relief. The last witness was gone. The last person who could testify to what had really happened was dead.
The story could finally be buried for good, allowed to fade into legend and folklore, stripped of its power to accuse and demand justice. Except it couldn’t because Kujo had done something that the Mi hadn’t anticipated. He had trusted Zoranil Hursten with the truth, and she had written it down. The manuscript sat in a drawer, unpublished and unknown, but it existed, and as long as it existed, the story could not be completely erased.
The truth, it turned out, was more patient than anyone realized. It could wait decades, generations even, for the right moment to emerge. And when that moment came, it would speak with Kujo<unk>’s voice, telling a story that refused to die. For decades after Kujo<unk>s death, the story of the Clatilda existed in a strange lenol space.
It was known locally in Mobile and Africa Town, passed down through families like a precious heirloom. Grandparents told grandchildren about the ship that had brought their ancestors from Africa, about the Meek family’s crime, about Kaju Lewis and the other survivors who had built a community from nothing. But outside of Africa Town, the story was treated as folklore, a legend that might or might not be true.
Interesting, but unverified. The Mia family continued to prosper through the midenth century. Their name was attached to streets, buildings, and businesses throughout Mobile. Mia Avenue ran through the heart of the city. The Mia State Park, donated by the family, was a popular recreation area. The family’s descendants were respected members of the community involved in business, politics, and civic organizations.
The Clutilda was never mentioned in connection with their name, and if anyone tried to bring it up, they were quickly dismissed as spreading unsubstantiated rumors. But history has a way of refusing to stay buried, especially when the wounds it inflicted have never healed. In the 1960s and 1970s, as the civil rights movement forced America to confront its racial history, scholars began to take a new interest in stories like cos, researchers started combing through archives looking for evidence of the Clatilda and other aspects of the slave
trade that had been deliberately hidden or forgotten. They found shipping records from Mobile in 1860 that showed unusual activity in July. boats moving at night, unexplained transfers of cargo, reports of federal customs officials investigating rumors of an illegal slave ship. They found newspaper articles from the time, brief mentions of Timothy Miho’s boast, and the subsequent investigation.
They found court documents related to Miho’s business dealings that showed large unexplained expenditures in early 1860 consistent with financing a slave trading voyage. The documentary evidence was fragmentaryary, airy, but suggestive. It supported the story that had been passed down in Africa Town, lending credibility to what had been dismissed as folklore.
Historians began to write about the Clatilda, including it in books about the slave trade and reconstruction. The story started to reach a wider audience, though it was still treated with some skepticism by mainstream historians who preferred to focus on well doumented events rather than stories based primarily on oral tradition.
In Africa Town itself, the community was struggling. The industrial development that had begun in the early 20th century had accelerated dramatically after World War II. Factories, chemical plants, and paper mills surrounded the neighborhood, bringing pollution, but few jobs for local residents. The air was thick with chemical smells.
The water in the mobile river was contaminated with industrial waste. Rates of cancer and respiratory disease in Africa Town were significantly higher than in other parts of Mobile. The community was also dealing with the effects of urban renewal and highway construction. In the 1960s, Interstate 165 was built, cutting through the heart of Africa Town and displacing dozens of families.
The highway created a physical barrier that isolated the neighborhood from the rest of Mobile, making it harder for residents to access jobs, services, and opportunities. The pattern was familiar to anyone who understood how urban planning had been used as a tool of segregation and discrimination. Highways were routed through black neighborhoods, destroying communities and depressing property values, while white neighborhoods were protected and preserved.
By the 1980s and 1990s, Africa Town was in serious decline. Young people were leaving, seeking opportunities elsewhere. Houses were abandoned, businesses closed, infrastructure crumbled. The community that Kajjo Lewis and the other Clatilda survivors had built with such determination and hope was slowly dying, strangled by pollution, neglect, and systemic discrimination.
But even as the physical community declined, interest in its history was growing. In 1997, the National Park Service conducted a study of Africa Town, documenting its historical significance and recommending that it be preserved as a cultural heritage site. The study included extensive research on the Clatilda, drawing on historical records, archaeological evidence, and oral histories passed down through families.
The report confirmed what Africa Town residents had always known. The CLA story was true. Timothy Mia and his brothers had illegally imported 110 enslaved Africans in 1860, burned the ship to hide the evidence, and escaped prosecution. The survivors had been forced to settle on land sold to them at inflated prices by their former enslaver, creating a community that was both a testament to their resilience and a reminder of the crime that had brought them there.
The National Park Service report should have been a turning point, a moment when the story was officially recognized and the community received the support and resources it deserved. But while the report generated some media attention and academic interest, it didn’t lead to significant change. Africa Town remained poor, polluted, and neglected.
The Miha family, when asked about the report, either declined to comment or issued vague statements about the complexity of history and the importance of moving forward rather than dwelling on the past. The physical evidence of the Clatilda, meanwhile, remained elusive. The ship had been burned and sunk in 1860, and the exact location was lost to time.
Over the decades, various people had searched for the wreck. But the mobile tensor delta is a vast complex waterway with countless bayou channels and swamps. Finding a single sunken ship in that environment was like finding a needle in a hay stack. Without the physical evidence of the ship itself, some historians continued to argue that the Clotilda story couldn’t be definitively proven.
Yes, there were historical records suggesting that something had happened. Yes, there were oral histories passed down through families, but without the ship, without concrete physical evidence, there was room for doubt. And as long as there was doubt, the story could be dismissed, minimized, or explained away. Then in 2018, something remarkable happened.
A reporter named Ben Reigns, working for the Alabama news website al.com, decided to search for the Clatilda. Reigns was an experienced investigative journalist and an amateur marine archaeologist. He had been researching the Clatilda story for years, and he was convinced that the ship could be found if someone looked in the right place with the right tools.
Reigns started by studying historical records, looking for clues about where Captain Foster might have scuttled the ship. He found accounts from people who had spoken to Foster years after the event, descriptions of the location that mentioned specific landmarks and geographical features. He studied old maps of the mobile tensaw delta, comparing them to modern satellite imagery to identify areas that match the historical descriptions.
Using this research, Reigns narrowed down the search area to a section of the mobile river north of the city. He then used sonar equipment to scan the river bottom, looking for anomalies that might indicate a shipwreck. The work was slow, tedious, and often frustrating. The river was murky, visibility was poor, and there were countless pieces of debris and natural features that created false positives.
But in January 2018, Reigns found something. The sonar showed a large object buried in mud on the river bottom in an area that matched the historical descriptions of where the clatilda had been scuttled. Reigns contacted marine archaeologists from the University of Southern Mississippi and the Alabama Historical Commission. Together, they conducted a more thorough investigation of the site.
What they found was unmistakably a ship from the mid-9th century. The vessel was partially buried in mud, but enough was visible to determine its size and construction. It was a two-masted schooner approximately 86 ft long, built of pine and oak, all details that matched historical descriptions of the Clatilda.
The ship showed evidence of fire damage consistent with accounts that it had been burned before being sunk. Over the next year, archaeologists carefully excavated and documented the wreck. They recovered artifacts, pieces of wood, metal fittings, fragments of rope, and canvas. They took samples for carbon dating and wood analysis, and piece by piece, they built a case for identification.
In May 2019, the Alabama Historical Commission made an official announcement. The wreck was the Clatilda. The physical evidence that had been missing for 159 years had finally been found. The story that had been dismissed as folklore that had been questioned and doubted and minimized was now proven beyond any reasonable doubt. The discovery made international news.
Major newspapers around the world ran stories about the last slave ship and its survivors. Television networks produced documentaries. Scholars who had spent years researching the Clatilda suddenly found their work in the spotlight. And in Africa Town, descendants of the Clootilda survivors felt a mixture of vindication and grief.
Vindication because their family stories had been proven true. Grief because it had taken so long for the world to believe them. The discovery of the Clatilda also raised uncomfortable questions about accountability and justice. The Miha family had built generational wealth on the backs of enslaved people, including those illegally imported on the Clatilda.
That wealth had been passed down through generations, creating opportunities and advantages that compounded over time. Meanwhile, the descendants of the Clutilda survivors had been systematically denied opportunities, subjected to discrimination, and forced to live in a community that was polluted and neglected.
The contrast was stark and undeniable. The descendants of the criminals were wealthy and comfortable, while the descendants of the victims struggled with poverty, environmental racism, and the ongoing effects of systemic discrimination. And this wasn’t ancient history. Many of the people living in Africa Town in 2019 were the great grandchildren or great great grandchildren of Clatilda survivors.
The crime had happened only five or six generations ago, well within living memory of families. Activists and community leaders in Africa Town began to speak out more forcefully about the need for reparations and restorative justice. They pointed out that the Miha family had never been prosecuted for their crime, had never paid any penalty, had never even acknowledged wrongdoing.
They argued that the family had a moral obligation to make amends to use some of the wealth built on slavery to help the community that had been harmed. The Miha family’s response was largely silence. A few family members made brief statements expressing general sympathy for the history of slavery and its ongoing effects, but they stopped short of accepting responsibility or offering any concrete form of restitution.
Some family members argued that they shouldn’t be held accountable for the actions of ancestors who had died more than a century ago. Others simply refused to comment, referring questions to lawyers who issued Tour’s no comment statements. The debate over accountability and reparations continued, raising fundamental questions about historical justice.
How do you make amends for crimes committed generations ago? Who is responsible? The direct descendants of the criminals or society as a whole? What form should reparations take? Financial compensation, land return, investment in community development, or something else? And how do you calculate the value of stolen lives, stolen labor, and stolen opportunities that compound across generations? These questions didn’t have easy answers, but the discovery of the Kilda made them impossible to ignore.
The physical evidence of the crime was now visible, documented, and preserved. The story could no longer be dismissed or minimized. The truth was out and it demanded a response. And then in 2018, just as the search for the Clatilda was intensifying, another piece of the puzzle fell into place. Zoran Neil Hursten’s manuscript Baron, which had been rejected by publishers in the 1930s and had sat in archives for decades, was finally published.
The decision to publish came from Hursten’s estate and Harper Collins publishers who recognized that the cultural moment had finally arrived for Kujo’s story to be heard. The book that had been too raw, too accusatory, too uncomfortable in the 1930s was exactly what readers in 2018 needed to hear. The manuscript was edited lightly for clarity, but Hursten’s decision to preserve Kajou<unk>’s voice and dialect was maintained.
The book presented Kajjo’s story exactly as he had told it in his own words with all its power and pain intact. Baron was published in May 2018, almost exactly one year before the Clatilda was officially identified. The timing was remarkable, almost as if Kujo’s voice was finally breaking through after decades of silence. The book became a bestseller, reaching audiences around the world.
Readers who had never heard of the Clatilda, who knew little about the details of the slave trade, were confronted with Kujo’s testimony, direct, personal, and impossible to dismiss. The publication of Baron did something powerful. It gave Kujo a voice across time. He had been dead for more than 80 years. But suddenly people were listening to him.
They were reading his descriptions of Bonte, his account of the raid and the middle passage. His careful explanations of how the Mias had maintained control even after slavery ended. They were hearing his grief over his lost children. His longing for Africa, his complicated feelings about America, a country that had stolen his life, but where he had built a family and a community.
Readers were struck by Kajou<unk>’s dignity, his intelligence, his moral clarity. He didn’t present himself as a victim seeking pity, but as a witness demanding that the truth be acknowledged. He didn’t ask for revenge, but he insisted on justice, not just for himself, but for all the people whose stories had been erased or forgotten.
The book also revealed something that many readers found shocking. Kujo’s story wasn’t just about the past. It was about the present. The systems of power, exploitation, and silence that had allowed the Mia to commit their crime and escape justice were still operating, just in different forms.
The mechanisms that had kept Kajou afraid to speak for 50 years. Economic dependence, social pressure, the threat of violence were still in place, still keeping people silent, still protecting the powerful from accountability. The combination of the Clatilda’s discovery and the publication of Baron created a cultural moment.
Suddenly the story was everywhere. In newspapers, on television, in academic conferences, in community meetings, people who had never thought much about the slave trade or its legacy were confronted with concrete evidence of how it had worked and how its effects persisted. In Africa Town, the attention brought both opportunities and challenges.
On one hand, there was renewed interest in preserving the community’s history and culture. The National Park Service began working on plans to create a heritage area. Foundations and nonprofits started funding community development projects. Tourists started visiting, wanting to see the place where the Clatilda survivors had built their lives.
On the other hand, the attention also brought concerns about gentrification and exploitation. Would the renewed interest in Africa Towns history lead to investment that benefited current residents? or would it drive up property values and displace the very people whose ancestors had built the community? Would the story be told in a way that honored the survivors and their descendants? Or would it be sanitized and commercialized, turned into a tourist attraction that erased the ongoing effects of the crime? These concerns were heightened by the fact
that much of the land around Africa Town was still owned by descendants of the Miha family or by corporations with ties to the family. The same patterns of power and control that had existed in Kujo’s time were still in place, just in more subtle forms. The fight for justice wasn’t just about acknowledging the past.
It was about changing the present and the future. In 2020, the Alabama Historical Commission announced plans to create a museum and heritage center in Africa Town dedicated to telling the story of the Clatilda and its survivors. The project would include preservation of Kujo Lewis’s house, which still stood on the land he had purchased from Timothy Miha more than 150 years earlier.
The house would be restored and open to the public, allowing visitors to walk through the rooms where Kujo had lived to see the garden where he had grown his vegetables to stand in the place where he had told Zoranil Hursten his story. The announcement was met with mixed reactions in Africa Town.
Some residents were excited about the recognition and the potential economic benefits. Others were skeptical, worried that the project would be controlled by outsiders who didn’t understand or respect the community’s needs and priorities. There were concerns about who would tell the story, how it would be told, and who would benefit from telling it.
Community leaders insisted that any development had to be led by, and for the benefit of Africa Town residents. They demanded that descendants of the Clatilda survivors be involved in every aspect of planning and implementation. They called for investments in infrastructure, environmental cleanup, education, and economic development, not just heritage tourism.
They argued that honoring the past meant addressing the present, that preserving history meant creating a better future for the people who carried that history in their blood and bones. These demands raised fundamental questions about what historical justice looks like in practice. Is it enough to acknowledge past wrongs, to build museums and monuments, to tell stories that were previously hidden? Or does justice require material change, reparations, land return, investment in communities that have been systematically harmed? And who gets to
decide what justice looks like? Historians and government officials or the descendants of the people who were harmed. As of today, these questions remain unresolved. The Clatilda Rex site has been designated a national historic landmark, protected and preserved for future study. Kajou Lewis’s house has been restored and is open for tours.
Barracun continues to be widely read. Introducing new generations to Kajjo’s story. Africa Town has received some investment and attention, though residents say it’s not nearly enough to address the decades of neglect and environmental damage. The Mihir family has largely remained silent, though the pressure for some form of accountability continues to grow.
In 2020, there were calls to rename streets and buildings that bore the Miha name to remove their names from public spaces as a way of refusing to honor people who committed such a serious crime. Some of these efforts have succeeded, others have stalled in the face of political opposition. But perhaps the most important legacy of the Clatilda story is not about museums or monuments or even reparations.
It’s about the power of testimony, the importance of memory, and the long arc of justice. Kujo Lewis waited 50 years after abolition to tell his story fully. Not because he was afraid of remembering, but because he was waiting for a world that was ready to listen, clears throat. He died in 1935 believing that his story might never be heard, that the truth might die with him.
But he had done something that ensured his voice would survive. He had trusted Zora Neil Hursten with his testimony and she had written it down. That manuscript sat in a drawer for 80 years, but it survived. And when the moment was right, when the culture was ready, it spoke with Kujo<unk>’s voice, telling a story that refused to die.
Today, visitors to Africa Town can stand in front of Kujo Lewis’s house and see the photograph that Zora Neil Hursten took in 1927. Kajjo is standing in front of his house, wearing works clothes, holding a walking stick. His face is weathered and tired, but his eyes are clear and direct, looking straight at the camera, looking at us, looking through time across generations, demanding to be seen and heard.
The story of Kajou Lewis is not a story about the distant past. It’s a story about memory, about the power of testimony, about the long arc of justice and how it bends only when people refuse to let the truth be buried. It’s a story about how crimes committed generations ago create consequences that ripple through time, affecting people who weren’t born when the crime occurred, but who inherit its effects nonetheless.
It’s also a story about resilience, about how people can survive unimaginable trauma and still build lives of meaning and dignity. Kajou Lewis survived the middle passage, survived slavery, survived 50 years of dangerous freedom, and survived long enough to make sure his story would outlive the people who wanted it.
Silenced, he didn’t get the justice he deserved in his lifetime. The Mia were never prosecuted, never punished, never even forced to acknowledge their crime. But he got something perhaps more powerful. He made sure that the truth survived. And truth once spoken can never be completely erased again. It can be ignored, dismissed, minimized, but it doesn’t disappear.
It waits, patient and persistent for the moment when people are ready to listen. And when that moment comes, it speaks with the voices of those who refuse to be silenced, who insisted that their lives mattered, who demanded that their stories be told. Kajou Lewis’s voice speaks to us today across 160 years, telling us about a crime that was supposed to be forgotten, about a ship that was supposed to stay buried, about a truth that was supposed to die. But it didn’t die.
It survived, carried forward by memory, by testimony, by the refusal of people to let injustice be erased from history. The question we face now is the same question Kujo faced. What do we do with the truth once it’s been told? Do we acknowledge it and then move on treating it as interesting history? Or do we recognize that the crime of the Clatilda and the system that allowed it to happen and be covered up created consequences that are still unfolding today? Do we see the connection between what happened to Kajou and what continues to happen to
his descendants and to black communities across America? These are not easy questions and they don’t have simple answers, but they are questions we must ask if we want to honor Kujo’s testimony. If we want to do justice to his memory, if we want to create a world where such crimes are not just acknowledged but addressed, where the truth is not just told but acted upon.
Kujo Lewis died in 1935, but his story lives on. It lives in the words he spoke to Zora Neil Hursten. Preserved in Barraun, it lives in the wreck of the Clatilda, now protected as a national historic landmark. It lives in Africa Town in the community that he and the other survivors built against all odds. And it lives in the ongoing struggle for justice, for recognition, for reparations, for a world where the truth matters, and where crimes are not forgotten just because they’re old.
In the end, Kujo won. Not the justice he deserved, not the peace he sought, not the return to Africa he longed for, but he won the battle that mattered most to him. He made sure the truth survived. And as long as the truth survives, as long as people remember and tell his story, as long as we refuse to let the past be buried and forgotten, there is hope for justice.
However long it takes to arrive, long it takes to arrive. Long it takes to arrive. Long it takes to arrive. Long it takes to arrive. Long it takes to arrive. Long it takes to arrive. It takes.
