Cudjo’s Own Story of the Last African Slaver

2020 Reprint of the 1927 Edition.  Full facsimile of the original edition and not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software.  Roughly 60 years after the abolition of slavery, anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston made an incredible connection: She located one of the last surviving captives of the last slave ship to bring Africans to the United States. Hurston, a known figure of the Harlem Renaissance who would later write the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, conducted interviews with the survivor but struggled to publish them as a book in the early 1930s. In fact, they were only released to the public in a book called Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” that came out on May 8, 2018.  Reprinted here is the original article outlining Hurston’s discovery.  It is also, perhaps, Hurston’s first published work.  Originally published in The Journal of Negro History, Volume 12, Number 4 | October 1, 1927.