APR News Director Pat Duggins will discuss the newsroom’s nine month investigation into preserving slave cemeteries in Alabama as part of a discussion about slavery in the state. The event takes place at the GulfQuest Maritime Museum in Mobile, tomorrow at 10 a.m. Duggins will be joined by William Green of the Clotilda Descendants Association, who will speak about growing up in Africatown as a descendant of one of the last group of kidnapped Africans brought to the United States aboard the slave ship Clotilda. The event at GulfQuest is part of Black History Month, and a lead-in to festival honoring the last known slave ship to cross the Atlantic which starts today in Mobile. The slave trade was abolished in 1860. But not before the Clotilda brought more than one-hundred Africans to Alabama. The fifth annual “Spirit of our Ancestors Festival” will host different documentaries, movies, plays, and speakers from today through Sunday. The Clotilda Descendants Association is putting on the event. Patricia Frazier is member of the association and the co-chairman of the festival. She explains why it’s important for people to participate in the festival.
:Two purposes,” she said. “To celebrate the one ten and to inform people or re-inform who are not aware of the story.”
The Clotilda Descendants Association is putting on the festival through Sunday. Members say they hope to inform people who are not aware of the ship’s story. The festival will host different documentaries, movies, plays, and speakers. Co-chairman Frazier says one of the documentaries being shown was produced by an Alabamian.
The documentary “Descendants” is probably about two hours. And furthermore, it was filmed and produce by a woman named Margaret Brown who happens to be a documentary person and she is a native of Mobile,” she said.
APR’s nine month investigation into preserving slave cemeteries in Alabama began with the first ever ground penetrating radar scan of the Old Prewett Slave Cemetery. That survey uncovered forty unknown graves. APR’s documentary “No Stone Unturned” can be found at the link below.