Emma Langdon Roche

Emma Langdon Roche (March 26, 1878 – April 5, 1945) was an American writer and artist, best known for her work Historic Sketches of The South (1914).

She was the first writer to publish a book based on interviews with Cudjoe Lewis, also known as Kossola, a survivor of the Middle Passage. He was a captive on the last known slave ship, Clotilda, which a group of Americans used to illegally import slaves to Alabama in 1860 from present-day Benin, decades after the 1807 prohibition of the Atlantic trade. Her book included an original photograph of Lewis and his wife, as well as her drawings of him and other of the survivors.

Background

Emma Langdon Roche was born in 1878 in Mobile, Alabama as the third of four surviving children of Thomas T. and Annie Laura (James) Roche. Her father was born in Ireland and had been brought to the US at the age of two in 1845 by his immigrant parents, to escape the Great Famine. He became a funeral director in Mobile. Her mother was born in Alabama, where her parents had moved from Virginia. (Emma's maternal grandmother was born in Vermont.)

Emma had three surviving brothers, Edward J. (born 1872, who also became a funeral director), Frank L. (born 1875) and the younger Thomas Sheppard Roche (born 1883). Two other children had died young. Their maternal aunt, Margaret James, also lived with the family.

Historic Sketches of The South

Visits to nearby Africatown prompted Roche to interview the residents, most of whom were freedmen. Here, Roche met Cudjoe (Kazoola) Lewis, one of the founders of Africatown. He was born in Africa and had been taken captive, sold into slavery and transported to Alabama onboard the Clotilde (or Clotilda), the last known illegal Atlantic slaver to bring slaves to the United States. Roche wrote and published a two-volume work known as Historic Sketches of The South (1914). It includes Roche's original drawings and photographs of the residents of Africatown.