Nick Tabor in conversation with Anthony Grooms - Africatown

Nick Tabor in conversation with Anthony Grooms - Africatown

Monday, Apr 03, 2023 7:00 PM

Location:
Georgia Center for the Book
Decatur Library
215 Sycamore Street
Decatur, Georgia 30030

An evocative and epic story, Nick Tabor's "Africatown" charts the fraught history of America from those who were brought here as slaves but nevertheless established a home for themselves and their descendants, a community which often thrived despite persistent racism and environmental pollution.

A Cappella Books and Georgia Center for the Book welcome journalist Nick Tabor to discuss his new book, "Africatown: America's Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created." Tabor will appear in conversation with award-winning author Anthony Grooms.

This event is free and open to the public. For the safety of our invited speakers, staff, and all attendees, masks are encouraged during the event. 

About the Book

In 1860, a ship called the Clotilda was smuggled through the Alabama Gulf Coast, carrying the last group of enslaved people ever brought to the U.S. from West Africa. Five years later, the shipmates were emancipated, but they had no way of getting back home. Instead, they created their own community outside the city of Mobile, where they spoke Yoruba and appointed their own leaders, a story chronicled in Zora Neale Hurston's Barracoon.

That community, Africatown, has endured to the present day, and many of the community residents are the shipmates' direct descendants. After many decades of neglect and a Jim Crow legal system that targeted the area for industrialization, the community is struggling to survive. Many community members believe the pollution from the heavy industry surrounding their homes has caused a cancer epidemic among residents, and companies are eyeing even more land for development.

At the same time, after the discovery of the remains of the Clotilda in the nearby riverbed, a renewed effort is underway to create a living memorial to the community and the lives of the slaves who founded it.

About the Author

Nick Tabor is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in New York Magazine, The New Republic, The Washington Post, Oxford American, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Africatown is his first book. He lives in New York.

About the Conversation Partner

Anthony Grooms was educated at the College of William and Mary and at George Mason University. He is the author of Ice Poems and Trouble No More: Stories and is the winner of the 1996 Lillian Smith Award. As a writer, teacher, and arts administrator, he has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the City of Atlanta Bureau of Cultural Affairs. He lives in Atlanta with his wife, Pamela B. Jackson.