The Middle Passage was the brutal transatlantic journey that forcibly transported millions of enslaved Africans from West Africa to the Americas, primarily for plantation labor. The first European slave ship transported enslaved Africans from São Tomé to New Spain in 1525. Over the next 300 years, roughly 12.5 million enslaved people were shipped across the Atlantic in horrific conditions, with a mortality rate of 10-19%. This forced migration was the largest in history and had a devastating impact on African societies.

The Middle Passage is a central, traumatic event in African-American and global literature. It is a defining subject in the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance, the prose of Toni Morrison, and the narrative of Olaudah Equiano, whose 1789 autobiography brought the horrors of the slave trade to a wide audience. The experience of the Middle Passage has been explored as a metaphor for the African diaspora and a foundational trauma in works of poetry, fiction, and memoir.