Books with title Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005

Penguin announces a prestigious new series under presiding editor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Many works of history deal with the journeys of blacks in bondage from Africa to the United States along the "middle passage," but there is also a rich and little examined history of African Americans traveling in the opposite direction. In Middle Passages, award-winning historian James T. Campbell vividly recounts more than two centuries of African American journeys to Africa, including the experiences of such extraordinary figures as Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Wright, Malcolm X, and Maya Angelou. A truly groundbreaking work, Middle Passages offers a unique perspective on African Americans' ever-evolving relationship with their ancestral homeland, as well as their complex, often painful relationship with the United States.

Penguin announces a prestigious new series under presiding editor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Many works of history deal with the journeys of blacks in bondage from Africa to the United States along the "middle passage," but there is also a rich and little examined history of African Americans traveling in the opposite direction. In Middle Passages, award-winning historian James T. Campbell vividly recounts more than two centuries of African American journeys to Africa, including the experiences of such extraordinary figures as Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Wright, Malcolm X, and Maya Angelou. A truly groundbreaking work, Middle Passages offers a unique perspective on African Americans' ever-evolving relationship with their ancestral homeland, as well as their complex, often painful relationship with the United States.

A groundbreaking history of African American journeys back to Africa over the course of three centuries, a book whose enormous accomplishment reveals to us that without understanding the long-evolving place of Africa in the African American imagination, our understanding of American history is woefully incomplete. In the four centuries after Columbus' voyage to the New World, some twelve million Africans were loaded into the holds of European ships and carried to the Americas as slaves. For most, the "middle passage" across the Atlantic was truly a voyage of no return. But beginning in the eighteenth century, a small number of African Americans found their way back to their ancestral continent. The roster includes many of the central figures in African American intellectual and political life, including Martin Delany, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Eslanda Robeson, Richard Wright, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Maya Angelou, to name only a few. As James T. Campbell shows in this marvelous book, these journeys illuminate not only the enduring importance of Africa in African American life but also the changing contours of African American life in the United States. Middle Passages recounts more than two hundred years of black American encounters with Africa, from the arrival of the first liberated slaves in what would become Liberia to the photojournalism and heritage tourism of the twenty-first century. Together, the stories recounted here-of journeys celebrated and obscure, journeys replete with irony and tragedy but also hope and inspiration-chart the history of African Americans' ever-changing relationship with Africa and, by extension, their complex, often painful, relationship with the United States. As the book makes wonderfully clear, to ask "What is Africa to Me?," the question famously posed by Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen, is also to ask, "What is America to me?" and, perhaps, "What am I to America?"