Margaret Brown doesn’t see herself as the director behind Descendant. “It’s not my story to tell,” she says about her Netflix documentary following activists in Africatown – a Black community in Mobile, Alabama – who rally to reclaim and preserve their history.
Many of Africatown’s citizens are descended from the Clotilda, the last recorded vessel to bring enslaved people into the United States in 1860. At the time, importing such human cargo was illegal. In her film, Brown, a Mobile-native who currently resides in Austin, Texas, interrogates the ways the narratives around the Clotilda and Africatown were recorded, framed or – like so much African American history – buried with intent.
