Clotilda

Representation in media

The Clotilda has been frequently portrayed in the media. Margaret Brown's 2008 documentary film The Order of Myths revealed that the queens of the two major, segregated Mardi Gras organizations in 2007 had a poignant link: the ancestors of the MCA queen had smuggled the ancestors of the MAMGA queen into Mobile Bay as slaves on the Clotilda. Brown followed up in 2022 with Descendant, a documentary film that looks into the Africatown community today, including the environmental and societal inequities still present after 160 years, and the impact the Clotilda's 2019 discovery had on the area. Produced by Netflix, it premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s Finding Your Roots, Season 4, Episode 9 (December 12, 2017), showed census data for Mobile, and Captain William Foster's journal from the Clotilda, during a segment explaining the family history of Questlove, a drummer and music producer, joint frontman of the hip hop group The Roots. His great-great-great-grandparents Charles Lewis (born c. 1820) and his wife Maggie (born 1830) were among the slaves brought from West Africa on the Clotilda. Gates found an article in The Pittsburgh Post of April 15, 1894 recounting the wager that Captain Timothy Meaher had made in 1859 that he could smuggle in slaves within two years, and one from The Tarboro Daily Southerner of July 14, 1860 that 110 Africans had arrived in Mobile on Clotilda.