Diouf, author of Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America. “It’s the best documented story of the entire slave trade, not only to the U.S., but to the Americas,” says historian Sylviane A. The musician Questlove is descended from survivors of the ship, and when he discovered this on the genealogy show Finding Your Roots, historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr., told him, “You hit the jackpot.”

Unable to return to Africa after emancipation on June 19, 1865- aka Juneteenth-they left records and gave interviews about who they were and where they came from that survive today. There were roughly 110 African children, teenagers, and young adults on board the Clotilda when it arrived in Alabama in 1860, just one year before the Civil War. Given this systematic erasure, the story of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to reach the U.S., occupies a profoundly unique place in the history of the transatlantic slave trade. It’s extremely difficult to connect the freed black Americans first named on the 1870 census to their enslaved ancestors-a problem known as the 1870 Brick Wall.

There’s also no way of discovering, as Malcolm X emphasized, their “true family name.” The slave trade ripped families apart, and records from slave ships and plantations often identified enslaved people with multiple or incomplete names. For most black Americans descended from enslaved Africans, there’s no way of tracing back where their ancestors came from.

Zora neale hurston clotilda