Research Uncovers Last Living African Native To Be Enslaved

Historians have discovered that the last survivor of the transatlantic slave trade lived closer to the present day than had previously been thought.

A woman named Matilda McCrear is said to be the last connection to enslaved Blacks who were taken from Africa. According to Newcastle University, she was captured by slave traders in West Africa when she was two years old in 1860 with her mother and three sisters and taken to Alabama, where they were held in captivity by Memorable Creagh, who owned a plantation. Two of her sisters were sold off and never seen again. Her father was lost and two brothers were left behind in Africa, said Newcastle researcher Dr. Hannah Durkin.

Initially Durkin had thought a woman named Sally “Redoshi” Smith, who died in 1837 was the last living African-born person held in slavery. But in her research, she discovered McCrear in 2019.

Trafficking enslaved Africans to America was abolished in 1807, but the practice is said to have persisted for decades, with many being brought to Brazil and Cuba as late as the 1860s.

On the Alabama plantation, McCrear and her mother and sister attempted to escape from slavery, but were captured and returned.

Enslaved Blacks were emancipated in 1863, but after the Civil War, millions continued to work southern lands as sharecroppers who tended to live in poverty and McCrear and her family was among their number.

Her mother, Grace, who had grown up in Africa, never gained a working command of English. However McCrear’s story took a different, more defiant direction. “She resisted what was expected of a Black woman in the U.S. South in the years after emancipation,” Durkin says. “She didn’t get married, instead she had a decades-long common-law marriage with a white German-born man, with whom she had 14 children.”

But the true nature of that relationship was unclear. While interracial relationships did exist in places, Blacks were relegated essentially to a caste system in which they were seen as inferior by the law, even if they lived with and had children with whites. Alabama passed the first of what it called “anti-miscegenation” laws beginning in 1866 making such relationships unlawful, but the primary people punished for breaking them were Blacks.

According to the Alabama Penal Code of 1866:
If any white person or negro, or the descendant of any negro, to the third generation inclusive, though one ancestor of each generation was a white person, intermarry or live in adultery with each other, each of them must, on conviction, be imprisoned in the penitentiary…

Black women were held in subjugation because of such laws and could be subject to sexual assault and rarely got any retribution. Black women and men could be subject to imprisonment, and many Black men were murdered even on the suspicion.

McCrear did however, appear to maintain some semblance of cultural normalcy, for example continuing to wear her hair in a traditional Yoruba style and kept tribal scars typically given to children during cultural rites, according to Durkin, whose research appears in the historical journal Slavery and Abolition.

But McCrear also may have been among the earliest advocates for what is now called reparations. In her 70s, Durkin writes, she walked to a local county courthouse to petition for compensation for being enslaved.

She lived in a part of Alabama called “Africatown” where there were still surviving slaves who had come on the same ship she had been taken on, the Clotilda, still spoke the Yoruba dialect and upheld their cultural traditions. She also changed her surname from Creagh to McCrear. Although courts dismissed her claim, she attracted media attention from the Selma Times-Journal and the stories she told were a chronicle of her life.

She died in 1940 in Selma, and at the time, a stigma was attached to those who had been enslaved. “The shame was placed on the people who were enslaved, rather than the slavers,” said Durkin.

But her grandson, Johnny Crear, 83, said the research answered many questions her family had about her story. “Her story gives me mixed emotions because if she hadn’t been brought here, I wouldn’t be here. But it’s hard to read about what she experienced.” he told Newcastle University press. But her spirit came as no surprise to him, particularly since the place she died was one of the catalysts of the modern Civil Rights Movement.

“From the day the first African was brought to this continent as a slave, we’ve had to fight for freedom,” he told the BBC. “It doesn’t surprise me that she was so rebellious.”