Cudjoe "Kazoola" Is My Hero

     The last known survivor from the last slave ship to enter America is my hero.     
     At age nineteen, Kazoola and other tribe members were captured by fellow Africans and sold to white slave traders for transport to Alabama even though the trans-Atlantic slave trade had been illegal for fifty-two years. Kazoola became Cudjoe Lewis.    
     For five years, Cudjoe and his fellow Africans labored, even rebuilding Mobile’s fortifications during the Civil War. Then one day, Union forces entered the city. The Africans celebrated to the beat of a drum - they were free. But they had no way to return home.     
​     Cudjoe asked his former slave master for reparations of land. He refused.  So the former slaves pooled their resources, bought land, and established a self-governing hamlet, African Town. They were safe there from the outside world that called them “savages” and “monkeys.” They built a school. Adjacent to Cudjoe’s property and facing east toward Africa, they established Old Baptist Church.
     I’m standing by a commemorative bust of Cudjoe outside that church, where congregants still meet and where descendants of the former slaves still live in the community. A plaque encourages “all citizens of humanity” to be like the former slaves and “choose perseverance and hope in the face of tremendous adversity.”       
     That’s what we need today, isn’t it? As racism rears its ugly head again and tempers boil over, can we choose perseverance and hope?    
     For the sake of Cudjoe, I hope so.