Project 110

We invite you to be a part of an effort to honor the 110 Africans who were illicitly brought to the United States on the schooner Clotilda in 1860. Your gifts will help ensure this important story comes to life on screen to be shared beyond the river banks of the Mobile River. Your gifts will help complete the funding needed to produce this film. A team of professors from the University of South Alabama and Spring Hill College are embarking on a historical documentary film that will attempt to capture the essence of their experiences before, during and after enslavement. The oral history of their descendants, interviews with historians, and a visual examination of historical documents and abstract thematic imagery will serve as the foundation of the documentary. A more focused perspective on the historical account of the life of Cudjo Lewis will help the audience connect more personally with the journey of the entire group of Africans on the ship, their enslavement in Alabama, and the subsequent establishment of Africatown, one of the only known settlements of exclusively native Africans in the United States.

Your gifts to Project 110 support the production team of Dr. Joél Lewis Billingsley, producer and Associate Professor at the University of South Alabama, Dr. Kern Jackson, co-producer and Director of African American Studies at the University of South Alabama, and Ryan Noble, director and Assistant Professor at Spring Hill College. Together they hope to create an innovative approach to the descriptive depictions of the life that was left behind in Africa, the trauma of being captured, sold into slavery, and “shipped” across the Atlantic, and the heroic survival of enslavement in Alabama, through visual imagery that parallels the poetic imagery of Cudjo Lewis’s “parables” and the retelling of the oral history by descendants and community members. The documentary also provides the perspective and insights of descendants of the 110 slaves and the journey of the descendants, including producer Dr. Joél Lewis Billingsley.

Project 110 is fundraising effort by the University of South Alabama. All gifts are tax-deductible.