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The artist uncovered some family history on the PBS show
time.com
Why Questlove's Discovery About His Ancestry on Finding Your Roots Is So Unusual
BY
LILY ROTHMAN
DECEMBER 12, 2017
On Tuesday night’s episode of
Finding Your Roots, the
Henry Louis Gates Jr.-hosted PBS celebrity genealogy show, the musician and producer Questlove (Amir Thompson) will get a chance to uncover his family’s earliest days in the United States. But, while the show always relies on
surprising reveals about its subjects’ backgrounds, it turns out that Questlove’s family has a distinction that sheds light not just on those individuals but on a larger story from American history. As shown in the clip above, the musician deduces in the course of the show that he is descended from enslaved people who came to the U.S. on the schooner
Clotilda (sometimes written as the
Clotilde), which means they would have been part of the
last known group of Africans ever brought to the United States as slaves — more than a half-century after the international slave trade was officially
banned.
Sylviane A. Diouf, who has researched the
Clotilda in great depth, writes in the introduction to her book
Dreams of Africa in Alabama that the group comprised more than 100 individuals who arrived north of Mobile in mid-1860, having spent more than a month on the ship. Though they were not the only enslaved people brought to the U.S. after the ban on the transatlantic trade, they would eventually become some of the most famous, after many decades of being forgotten by history. A few years after their arrival in Alabama, members of that group would be among the people freed during the course of the Civil War, and many of them were able to reunite from the places to which they had been sold. But, though only a few years had passed, they could not return home to West Africa. Instead they found a way to make the place to which they had been brought in bondage into their home, founding an Alabama town called Africatown. The
last survivor of the group — a man who had been extensively
interviewed by Zora Neale Hurston about his experience — died in 1935, but some of the original residents’ families still live there.
The discovery of ancestors on the
Clotilda isn’t just an interesting genealogical fact. As Gates says, it means that Questlove is the only African-American he knows who can answer a question that many have asked: not only where in Africa his ancestors came from, but how exactly they got to the U.S. in the first place. As shown in this second clip, provided exclusively to TIME, Questlove hit the genealogical “jackpot”:
Meant for another thread?
but breaking this copy into spaced out paragraphs would go a long way. It still looks like one big sentence run on.
