'Descendant' weaves together two powerful stories: That of the slave ship Clotilda, whose wreckage was hidden after its infamous final voyage and found in 2019, and that of Africatown, the Mobile community founded by its survivors.
It’s not every night you see a line outside the Mobile Saenger Theater that wraps from the main entrance on Joachim around the corner and all the way down the block along Conti Street. When the people in the line are there to see a movie they just as easily could have stayed home and watched on Netflix, you know there’s a powerful draw at work.
From Left_ Director Margaret Brown, Executive Producer Ahmir Questlove Thompson, Joycelyn Davis, Joe Womack , Veda Tunstall, Emmett Lewis, Kern Jackson and Kamau Sadiki take part in a panel discussion after a screening of "Descendant" at the Mobile Saenger Theatre.
“It’s definitely been my favorite screening to date,” she said. “Because, you know, you make it for your hometown. You make it to affect the lives of people where you’re from.” Joycelyn Davis: “Mobile was special because it’s home and people actually know these people, they know the area. I say that they know the area, but I’ve had friends to tell me, ‘I didn’t know this about Telegraph Road. I didn’t know this about Meaher Avenue’ -- which, we call it Meaher Street but it’s Meaher Avenue, and Timothy Avenue -- They’ll say, ‘I didn’t know. I didn’t know there were plantations in Mobile.’ That was what I got from a lot of my peers. But I grew up with the stories.
And they talk about Jack Friend. Who knew about this guy who, back in the ‘90s, looked for the Clotilda? I didn’t. So it was very informational, educational, it was all of the above.” Director Margaret Brown, at left, and Executive Producer Ahmir Questlove Thompson take part in a panel discussion after a screening of "Descendant" at the Mobile Saenger Theatre. One of the issues broached on in “Descendant” is the thorny subject of reparations. Speaking afterward, Lewis touched on the anger inherent in the question of the wrongs done to the enslaved, and whether any recompense could make it right.
“I was really excited for that moment because Emmett hasn’t been traveling with the film as much as Joycelyn and Veda had,” she said. “So I was excited for him to have that moment because he is such a leader. I think sometimes it helps to hear that from people like Questlove. I think that was a valuable moment.”
Participant, the media company behind the production of the film, has launched an “Impact Campaign” along with the film’s release. Full information can be found at, a site where visitors are encouraged to “join descendants and community leaders in preserving Africatown’s story and fighting for its future.” The site includes tools to help people preserve their own oral histories and uncover their family histories.
“There’s this sort of swirl,” Brown said. “In terms of the community and the descendants, it’s kind of overlapping things. All these things can exist in the same place. In the movie they certainly do. It’s kind of the complicated history of the South. None of this can be separated. It’s all these strands running alongside and entwined with each other.”
“I’m just big on the descendants not just being figureheads for Africatown, and not just helping to drive the bus for the city of Mobile,” said Tunstall. “I want them to assist us in what we’re trying to do as opposed to the other way around. So the biggest thing to me is for us to develop our plan and our vision of Africatown and for the city to get on board and do the right things to make that to happen.
Joe Womack: “I think the thing that has come to the front for everybody to see...The fact is that you’ve got a group of people that are settled in an area of Mobile that want to be sort of left alone and left safe. But businesses keep moving in.” “It’s really the proximity to industry has been a singular problem with the overall development of Mobile,” Sprague said. “I feel like the real-estate development community, the tourism economy community, that they’re distinctly aware of, and that is downplayed at the policy level because of the counter-argument that it’s jobs versus environment and this is where our balance is met.”
But putting so much attention on Africatown, Sprague said, the release of “Descendant” is an event that “sets the stage for the deeper conversations about how policy must change at this point.”
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