The 30th Annual Tribute To The Ancestors Of The Middle Passage.

On Saturday, June 7, 2019, began at 12 noon and ended at 6:00 pm, the People of the Sun Middle Passage Collective along with Medgar Evers College Student Government Association and Akeem Productions paid tribute during the 30th Annual Tribute to the Ancestors. It was a day of remembrance, reflection, meditation, and celebration in honor of those who died during the voyage of the Atlantic slave trade. The celebration also honor those who dedicate their lives to the struggle of the African people worldwide.

The waters of Coney Island witnessed over 1,000 of the Middle Passage survivors. While in 1444, began the opening of the Middle Passage, and did not end until the late 19th century, particantes share their grieve, love, and reflection. The ceremony began with libation and ancestors roll call tribut. Drumming, singing, storytelling, dancing and poetry, were components of the honoring ceremonhy. The participants then marched from the Boardwalk to the Water’s edge to reflect and remember the spirits of the ancestors with addtional drumming and dancing into the evening.

Historical Context: Facts about the Slave Trade and Slavery

by Steven Mintz

TRANS-ATLANTIC SLAVE VOYAGES

Over the period of the Atlantic Slave Trade, from approximately 1526 to 1867, some 12.5 million slaves had been shipped from Africa, and 10.7 million had arrived in the Americas. The Atlantic Slave Trade was likely the most costly in human life of all of long-distance global migrations.

The first Africans forced to work in the New World left from Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century, not from Africa. The first slave voyage direct from Africa to the Americas probably sailed in 1526.

The volume of slaves carried off from Africa reached thirty thousand per year in the 1690s and eighty-five thousand per year a century later. More than eight out of ten Africans forced into the slave trade made their journeys in the century and a half after 1700.

By 1820, nearly four Africans for every one European had crossed the Atlantic. About four out of every five females that traversed the Atlantic were from Africa.

The majority of enslaved Africans were brought to British North America between 1720 and 1780. The decade 1821 to 1830 still saw over 80,000 people a year leaving Africa in slave ships. Well over a million more – one tenth of the volume carried off in the slave trade era – followed within the next twenty years.

Africans carried to Brazil came overwhelmingly from Angola. Africans carried to North America, including the Caribbean, left from mainly West Africa.