Matilda McCrear

Matilda McCrear (c. 1857 – January 1940) was the last known living survivor in the United States of the transatlantic slave trade and the ship Clotilda. She was a Yoruba who was captured and brought to Mobile, Mobile County, Alabama at the age of two with her mother and older sister.

The girls were sold away from their mother and never reunited. Together with other American slaves in territory not occupied by the Union in the South, Matilda was granted freedom by the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. She and her family did not achieve freedom until after the de jure abolition of slavery in 1865. She continued to be a sharecropper as an adult and had a family of fourteen children with a white German-born American common-law husband. She died in Selma, Alabama.

McCrear's life became publicly known through research by Hannah Durkin of Newcastle University, published in 2020.