Cudjoe Lewis

Cudjoe Kazoola (Kossola) Lewis
Portrait of Cudjo Kazoola Lewis by Emma Langdon Roche, c. 1914
Born	c. 1840 Banté region, Benin, West Africa
Died	July 17, 1935 Africatown, Mobile, Alabama
Occupation	farmer, laborer, church sexton
Known for	Last known survivor of the Atlantic slave trade between Africa and the United States.

Cudjoe Kazoola Lewis (c. 1840 – 1935), or Cudjo Lewis, was the last known survivor of the Atlantic slave trade between Africa and the United States. Together with 115 other captives, he was brought illegally to the United States on board the ship Clotilde in 1860. They were landed in the backwaters near Mobile, Alabama and hidden from authorities. The ship was scuttled to evade discovery.

After the Civil War, Lewis and other members of the Clotilde group became free and established a community at Magazine Point, north of Mobile, Alabama. Now designated as the Africatown Historic District, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2012. In old age Lewis preserved the experiences of the Clotilde captives by providing accounts of the history of the group to visitors, including Mobile artist and author Emma Langdon Roche and author and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston.

He was born as Kossola around 1840 in West Africa. (American listeners would later transcribe his given name as "Kazoola.") Analyzing names and the other words attributed to the Africatown founders, historian Sylviane Diouf has concluded that he and many other members of the community belonged to the Yoruba ethnic group (although the term would not have been used at that time), and lived in the Banté region of what is now Benin. His father was named Oluwale (or Oluale) and his mother Fondlolu; he had five full siblings and twelve half-siblings, the children of his father's other two wives. Interviewers Roche and Hurston, and those who used their work, referred to Lewis and his fellow-captives as "Tarkars." Diouf believes that the term "Tarkar" might have come from a misunderstanding of the name of a local king, or the name of a town.

During April or May 1860, Lewis was taken prisoner by the army of the Kingdom of Dahomey as part of its annual dry-season raids for slaves. Along with other captives, he was taken to the slaving port of Ouidah and sold to Captain William Foster of the Clotilde, a ship based in Mobile, Alabama, and owned by businessman Timothy Meaher. Although importation of enslaved persons into the United States had been illegal since 1808, Meaher may have believed that he could flout the law without consequences. In a similar situation, the owners of the Wanderer, which had illegally brought a cargo of enslaved people to Georgia in 1858, were indicted and tried for piracy in the federal court in Savannah in May 1860 but acquitted in a jury trial. By the time the Clotilde reached the Mississippi coast in July 1860, government officials had been alerted to its activities and Timothy Meaher, his brother Burns, and their associate John Dabney were charged with illegal possession of the captives. However, there was a gap of almost five months between the end of July 1860, when summonses and writs of seizure were issued against the Meahers and Dabney, and mid-December when they received them. During the intervening period the captives were dispersed and hidden, and without their physical presence as evidence the case was dismissed in January 1861.