4. SURVIVORS: THE LOST STORIES OF THE LAST CAPTIVES OF THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

In July 1860, more than half a century after the federal law banned the importation of captive Africans and just nine months before the beginning of the American Civil War, the last slave ship, Clotilda, docked in Mobile Bay, Alabama. Dr Hannah Durkin tells the stories of the Clotilda slaves following their lives from their kidnappings in what is modern-day Nigeria through a terrifying 45-day journey across the Middle Passage and their sale into slavery at the dawn of the Civil Rights movement. Of the 103 captives who survived the voyage, Matilda McCrear, the last of them, died in January 1940 at the age 83, just five years before the nuclear age. This is an astonishing, deeply compelling tapestry of history, biography and social commentary.