by James T. Campbell; Preface by David Levering Lewis

A groundbreaking history of African American encounters with Africa over two and a half centuries. Middle Passages examines more than two centuries of African American journeys to Africa, from the arrival of the first colonists in Sierra Leone and Liberia to the heritage tourism of our own time. The book's subjects include many of the central figures in American intellectual, political, and artistic life--Martin Delany, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Malcolm X, and Maya Angelou, to name only a few--as well as men and women whose names have been lost to history. Together, the journeys recounted here--journeys replete with irony and tragedy yet limned with hope and inspiration--illuminate African Americans' ever evolving relationship with Africa and, by extension, their complex, often painful relationship to the United States.