About Matilda

Matilda McCrear was born around 1857 in West Africa, given the name Abake, meaning "born to be loved by all," among the Tarkar people. At just two years old, she was torn from her home along with her mother and sisters by troops of the Kingdom of Dahomey and forced on a brutal march to the coast of what is now Benin. There, she and her family were sold and loaded onto the Clotilda, a schooner that would become the last known slave ship to carry captives across the Atlantic to North America. After an agonizing 80-day journey, she arrived in Alabama in early 1860, stripped of her name, her freedom, and much of her family.

Matilda survived slavery, emancipation, and decades of life under Jim Crow, raising ten children while working as a sharecropper near Selma, Alabama. Though the world tried to erase her, she never stopped asserting her identity, wearing her hair in a traditional West African style throughout her life and even walking 15 miles on foot in 1931 to seek compensation for what had been done to her and her family. She died on January 13, 1940, the last known survivor of the transatlantic slave trade. Her story is one of extraordinary endurance, quiet resistance, and an unbreakable spirit, and it deserves to be told.