Meet author Nick Tabor, author of Africatown: America’s Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created, in dialogue with MSU History Professor Walter Hawthorne.

An evocative and epic story, Nick Tabor’s Africatown charts the fraught history of America from those who were brought here as slaves but nevertheless established a home for themselves and their descendants, a community which often thrived despite persistent racism and environmental pollution.

“There’s a lot of talk these days about the need to trace present-day problems of poverty and racial inequality to historical discrimination and disinvestment. In Africatown, Nick Tabor has drawn this connection in the most compelling way possible, showing how a single community created as a direct legacy of the slave trade in the final throes of its rapacity continued to suffer–and strive to overcome–other ordeals throughout the generations, right now to the present-day ills of environmental racism and economic displacement. This is a true American story, deeply reported and lucidly told.”–Alec MacGillis, author of Fulfillment: America in the Shadow of Amazon