‘Descendant’ Review: The Discovery of a Sunken Slave Ship Galvanizes a Community in Sundance-Winning Doc

In 1808, the Unites States banned the importation of slaves, effectively putting an end to the transatlantic slave trade. Or so the history books have it, although the residents of Mobile, Ala.’s Africatown neighborhood know otherwise: Human trafficking continued for decades more. More than half a century later, in 1860, many of their ancestors were smuggled into the port city aboard a ship called the Clotilda by white men who’d wagered they could get away with it — and did, destroying the evidence. With no ship and no manifest, federal investigators dropped their case against the culprits, Timothy Meaher and… Read Full Article