Circa 1859, Cudjoe Lewis, a native of the Yoruba tribe in what is now the West African country of Benin, was one of over a hundred African men and women purchased and brought across the Atlantic to Mobile, Alabama, aboard the slave ship Clotilde. After a period of de facto slavery, he and other members of the Clotilde group became free and organized a community in Plateau, part of today’s Africatown Historic District. They formed a self-governing society and established the Old Baptist Church, now known as The Union Baptist Church of Plateau. Lewis married Celia “Abile” Lewis, another Clotilde survivor, and they had several children. He was known for working diligently to keep and share the group’s history, and upon his death he was laid to rest in the nearby Old Plateau Cemetery.