We are a non-profit tax exempt organization established in 2011 to honor the two million captive Africans who perished during the middle passage.
The Middle Passage Ceremonies and Port Markers Project (MPCPMP) is a non-profit tax-exempt organization established in 2011 to honor the two million captive Africans who perished during the trans-Atlantic crossing known as the Middle Passage and the ten million who survived to build the Americas.
Our Initiative involves:
- Commemorating the nearly 12 million Africans involved in the Middle Passage of the trans-Atlantic human trade.
- Encouraging local communities to hold remembrance ceremonies at each of the 90 documented Middle Passage arrival sites in the United States of America.
- Educating the community about the vital contribution that Africans and their descendants made locally and nationally in the development of this nation.
- Partnering with historical and cultural societies, academic institutions, churches, visitor and tourist bureaus, and community organizations to promote African Diaspora history and culture.
The trans-Atlantic trade, known as the Middle Passage, is the largest forced migration in human history. Research shows that 12 million Africans were captured and permanently removed from their homeland; 2 million died during the voyage; and 10 million disembarked in the Americas — North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean. Approximately 500,000 arrived in U.S. North America. Using Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database and other scholarly source material, 53 arrival locations on the North American mainland have been identified. Specifically, these are the places where captive children, women, and men who survived the ocean voyage first placed their feet after being forcibly removed from Africa. It is at these locations that African American history began.
Not a single one came by choice. The origins of protest began as captives in Africa, continued during the ocean journey, and at the point of arrival as enslaved people. Protest and resistance are embedded in the history of these ancestors and their descendants. The Middle Passage Ceremonies and Port Markers Project (MPCPMP), founded in 2011, is committed to truth-telling — acknowledging the history of the Middle Passage and commemorating the lives of these Africans at the 53 documented arrival locations identified on the map (See above). To do this, we encourage local communities to conduct ancestral remembrance ceremonies and install public markers to honor African ancestors. Forty-three of these arrival locations are designated a Site of Memory of the UNESCO Routes of Enslaved Peoples: Resistance, Liberty and Heritage project. The years reflect ships coming directly from Africa to the US mainland.
For more mission information visit middlepassageproject.com
Interview with Tara Roberts: Written in the Waters: A Memoir of History, Home, and Belonging
An interview with Tara Roberts, National Geographic Explorer in residence and author of Written in the Waters: A Memoir of History, Home and Belonging. Connecting with divers, scholars, archaeologists, friends, and family, this lyrical memoir documents Tara’s experiences working along the coastlines of Africa, North America, and Central America seeking the wrecks of vessels that carried captive Africans. Recorded in November 2025.
Freedom Ship – MPCPMP International Day of Remembrance Webinar
Since 2012 the Middle Passage Ceremonies and Port Markers Project (MPCPMP) has observed the United Nations-designated International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and Its Abolition. This year was no exception as we hosted a remarkable conversation between two scholars and historians:
Marcus Rediker, author and Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh; and Corey Walker, Dean of School of Divinity and Professor of Humanities at Wake Forest University and member of the MPCPMP Advisory Board.
The Middle Passage Project Events
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Recommended Books
The African Diaspora: Revisionist Interpretations of Ethnicity, Culture and Religion under Slavery, Paul E. Lovejoy
Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, Manu Herbstein
American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, Theodore Dwight Weld
Ancestors and Relatives: Genealogy, Identity and Community, Eviator Zerubavel
Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, David Eltis and David Richardson
Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions, Jane Landers
The Atlantic Slave Trade, Herbert S. Klein
Barracoon: The Story of the Last Cargo, Zora Neale Hurston
Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation, Nicholas Guyatt
Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America, Martha S. Jones
The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Paul Gilroy
Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1518-1865, Daniel P. Mannix
Black Florida, Jane Landers
Black Imagination and the Middle Passage, “The Slave Ship Dance,” Genevieve Fabre
Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion, Peter H. Wood
The Black Population in Mexico, Aguirre Beltran
Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-century New England, William Dillon Piersen
The Book of Negroes, Lawrence Hill
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson
Citizens Creek, Lalita Tademy
The Coming: A Novel, Daniel Black
The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America, Gerald Horne
Dark Places of the Earth: The Voyage of the Slave Ship Antelope, Jonathan M. Bryant
Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and Race in New England, 1780-1860, Joanne Pope Melish
The Door of No Return: The History of Cape Coast Castle and the Atlantic Slave Trade, William St Clair
Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America, Sylviane A. Diouf
Ebony and Ivy, Craig Steven Wilder
A Forgotten History: The Slave Trade and Slavery in New England, Choices for the 21 Century Education Program, Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University
Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea, Marcus Rediker
Exchanging Our Country Masks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South, Michael Gomez
The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, Edward E. Baptist
Hanging of Angelique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal, Afua Cooper
Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi
How the Word is Passed, Clint Smith, June 2021
The Human Tradition in the Black Atlantic: 1500-2000, edited by Beatriz G. Mamigonian and Karen Racine
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs
The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage, John Harris
The Logbooks: Connecticut’s Slave Ships and Human Memory, Anne Farrow
Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, Saidiya Hartman
The Middle Passage: White Ships, Black Cargo, Tom Feelings
Motives of Honor, Pleasure and Profit: Plantation Management in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1607-1763, Lorena Walsh
Negro President, Gary Wills
Never Caught: The Washington’s Relentless Pursuit of the Runaway Slave Ona Judge, Erica Armstrong Dunbar
New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America, Wendy Warren
The Negro in Colonial New England, Lorenzo Green
The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander
Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household, Thavolia Glymph
A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present, Howard Zinn
Ports of the Slave Trade (Bights of Benin and Biafra), Papers from a conference of the Centre of Commonwealth Studies, University of Stirling, June 1998
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution: 1710-1823, David Brian Davis
Red River, Lalita Tademy
Redefining African Regions for Linking Open-Source Data, Henry B. Lovejoy et. al
Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transitional ad Comparative History, Ana Lucia Araujo
Revolts, Protests, Demonstrations and Rebellions in American History: An Encyclopedia, Volumes 1-3, Steven L. Danver
Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to America, Stephanie E. Smallwood
Sex and Racism in America, Calvin C. Hernton
Shadows of the Slave Past: Memory, Heritage, and Slavery, Ana Lucia Araujo
Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies and Sparked the American Revolution, Alfred W. Blumrosen and Ruth G. Blumrosen
The Slave Ship: A Human History, Marcus Rediker
The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Making of Africatown, USA: Spirit of Our Ancestors, Natalie S. Robertson
Slave Voices: The Sounds of Freedom, edited by Hilary McD. Beckles and Verene Shephard (U.W.I.), UNESCO Associated Schools Project Network
Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past, Ana Lucia Araujo
Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage, Sowande’ M. Mustakeem
Slavery by Another Name, Douglas A. Blackman
Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons, Sylviane A. Diouf
Slavery’s Trail of Tears: Retracing America’s Forgotten Migration – The Journey of a Million African-Americans from the Tobacco to the Cotton South, Edward Ball
Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, Walter Johnson
Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, Ibram X. Kendi
Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyrany of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History, James W. Loewen
The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead
They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence I Ancient America, Ivan Van Sertima
They Were Good Soldiers: African Americas Serving I the Continental Army, 1775-1783, John U. Rees
There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America, Vincent Harding
Tobacco Coast: A Maritime History of Chesapeake Bay in the Colonial Era, Arthur Pierre Middleton
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, Isabel Wilkerson
The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead
Transatlantic Transformations: The Origins and Identities of Africans in the Americas, Paul E. Lovejoy
Wandering in Strange Lands, Morgan Jerkins
Water Graves: The Art of the Unritual in the Greater Caribbean, Valerie Loichot
White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America,
Nancy Isenberg
The World They Made Together: Black ad White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia, Mechal Sobel
Video and Film Links
Africans in America – PBS Series
An Ocean in My Bones – Jocelyn Davis
The Clotilda Descendants Association hosted the fourth annual Spirit of Our Ancestors Festival on February 12, 2022.
The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes – Slate
Daughters of the Dust
Enslaved 50 Years after Slave Trade Outlawed. Their Descendants Want to Save Their Town. – WWL-TV
“What Juneteenth tells us about the value of black life in America” – The Washington Post
Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North
The Transatlantic Slave Trade Project (Trimble)
Twelve Years a Slave
