Keys to the past and the future of a community descended from enslaved Africans lie in a river bottom on Alabama's Gulf Coast, where the remains of the last known U.S. slave ship rest a few miles from what's left of the village built by the newly freed people after the Civil War.
Work performed this month will help answer a question residents of the area called Africatown USA are anxious to resolve: Can remnants of the slave ship Clotilda be retrieved from the water to both fill out details about their heritage and to serve as an attraction that might revitalize the place their ancestors built after emancipation?
