Matilda McCrear

Matilda McCrear (c. 1857 – January 13, 1940), born Àbáké, was the last known survivor in the United States of the transatlantic slave trade and the ship Clotilda. She was a Yoruba who was captured and brought to Mobile, Alabama at the age of two with her mother and older sister.

The girls were sold away from their mother and never reunited. Together with other American slaves in territory not occupied by the Union in the South, Matilda was granted freedom by the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. She and her family did not achieve freedom until after the de jure abolition of slavery in 1865. She continued to be a sharecropper as an adult and had a family of fourteen children with a white German-born American common-law husband. She died in Selma, Alabama.

McCrear's life became publicly known through research by Hannah Durkin of Newcastle University, published in 2020. The Dahomeyans transported their prisoners to Ouidah, a coastal port for slave trading. Captain William Foster of the Clotilda, the last known slave ship to have carried captives from Africa to the United States, later arrived in Ouidah and transported 110 enslaved Africans including McCrear to the United States illegally (the U.S. prohibited the Atlantic slave trade in 1808 with the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves). The raid that led to her capture was part of a bigger system in which the Kingdom of Dahomey participated in the Atlantic slave trade by capturing and selling slaves.

Writing in his journal in 1860, Foster described how the enslaved prisoners came aboard his ship:

McCrear was a member of the Yoruba people. She received traditional facial scars which were visible for the rest of her life. When she was two years old, McCrear, her mother Gracie, and sister Sallie (as they were named in the U.S.) were captured and bought by a planter, Memorable Creagh. They were among more than 100 Africans transported in 1860 on the Clotilda. Sharecropping emerged after the Civil War and it often kept formerly enslaved individuals in cycles of debt and economic dependency. Although African Americans were technically free, many were unable to gain wealth or gain financial stability due to certain sharecropping rules. McCrear’s experience as a sharecropper reflects these challenges faced by African Americans in the South after emancipation.

In her seventies, McCrear made a legal claim for compensation for her enslavement, which was dismissed. She reportedly traveled long distances in an effort to pursue the claim, demonstrating determination to fight the conditions of her enslavement even decades after emancipation. According to Durkin, she appears to have continued to have worn her hair in a traditional Yoruba style all her life.

In January 1940, McCrear fell ill after a stroke. She died January 13 in Selma, Alabama, aged 83.

Prior to the publication of Durkin's research in 2020, McCrear's contemporary Redoshi (c. 1848 – 1937) was thought to be the last living survivor of the Clotilda and of the transatlantic slave trade.