Enslaved Africans led by Sengbe Pieh seized control of the schooner La Amistad near Cuba in July 1839. A United States vessel later captured the ship off Long Island, leading to a major legal dispute. The Supreme Court eventually ruled that the Africans had been illegally enslaved and should be freed.

Robert Hayden incorporated the Amistad story into Middle Passage, a modernist poem that sets official documents against the voices of enslaved people. The vessel became a powerful poetic emblem of resistance rather than passive victimhood within the history of the Atlantic slave trade.