It's time to help boost Africatown, an important community near Senior Bowl's Mobile home

The Senior Bowl has called Mobile, Alabama, home for all but one of its 75 years of existence. It is the pre-draft season's largest and most celebrated college football all-star game, an annual affair that consistently brings together some of the NFL's brightest and most powerful people -- including representatives of the billion-dollar organizations that drive the country's biggest sport -- to watch top prospects.

I've been attending the event for the past 33 years -- but, to my deep regret, it wasn't until 2018 that I learned about a community located less than four miles north of where the Senior Bowl takes place called Africatown. The residents there have deep roots, surviving for well over a century despite facing the effects of racism and environmental injustice, and they deserve to have their story shared as widely as possible.

Africatown was founded shortly after slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865. The community's founders were a group of enslaved West Africans who were taken there in 1860 -- decades after it became illegal to import enslaved people to the country -- on the Clotilda, a ship owned by Timothy Meaher. It was the last-known vessel to transport enslaved people to the United States. After emancipation, these formerly enslaved people wished to return to Africa, but they didn't have the means to make the journey, so they settled in the location that would come to be known as Africatown, establishing their own community and maintaining ties to their history. Today, less than 1,000 people live in the economically disadvantaged community -- there had been 12,000 in the 1960s -- and some of the descendants of the community's founders still call it home.

Many have told the story of Africatown