At the core of the origin story of African-American history—in fact, of all people of African descent in the Western hemisphere—is migration.
The greatest, most dangerous, most destructive, and most formative of these treks was their original transplantation into enforced slavery out of Africa to the New World. But that was only the start. If they survived the dreaded middle passage across the ocean, the newly enslaved people faced additional uprootings once they arrived at their new locations. And because their situation in the United States was comparatively better than that of slaves in the Caribbean—who were worked to death in the more dangerous disease environment there, and thus never suffered additional transportation to other lands—many American slaves made repeated moves during their longer lives.
