My wife and I discussed this topic several days ago while talking about reparations. We brought up the subject of African deaths versus the Holocaust, and both remembered that it wasn’t taught to us during segregation and integration in schools or at home.
History is not merely a record of what happened. It is also a record of what societies choose to remember, how they choose to remember it, and what they allow future generations to forget. Few subjects demonstrate this tension more powerfully than the history of the transatlantic slave trade and the Middle Passage. For centuries, millions of Africans were captured, separated from their families, marched to the coast, imprisoned, sold, forced aboard ships, and transported across the Atlantic under conditions that caused enormous suffering and death. Yet many people still do not understand the full magnitude of this human catastrophe.
So, instead of just asking, "How many Africans died during the Middle Passage?" we should also wonder why this heartbreaking tragedy hasn’t been more prominently remembered in public memory, education, museums, memorials, and our national dialogues about human suffering.
The answer requires careful thought. It's important to recognize that it's not entirely true to say that the Middle Passage has been completely hidden or that scholars have intentionally concealed its history. Many respected institutions, historians, museums, and databases have worked hard to document it thoroughly. Organizations like the Smithsonian, the National Endowment for the Humanities, universities, museums, and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database have all made remarkable efforts to deepen our understanding of that part of history. More accurately, the challenge is that this history has sometimes been underrepresented, fragmented, minimized, or taught without enough emphasis on its human suffering and global impact. Recognizing this distinction matters because suggesting concealment implies a deliberate conspiracy, while the reality is more complex, involving factors like racism, political interests, educational traditions, national narratives, economic memories, and the challenge of teaching a brutal chapter of history that spanned centuries and continents.
It's estimated that approximately 12.5 million Africans were forcibly taken and shipped across the Atlantic during the transatlantic slave trade. Among them, about 10.7 million survived the difficult journey and arrived in the Americas and Caribbean. Sadly, around 1.8 million people lost their lives during this perilous voyage, reminding us of the tremendous human cost of this tragic chapter in history. ([NEH][1])
That number is an estimate, not an exact count. Historians aren't able to produce a death certificate for every person who died aboard a slave ship. Many records were incomplete, lost, falsified, or simply never made. Still, the surviving shipping records are detailed enough to give us a good sense of the trade's scale. It's important to remember that this trade was illegal. Charges of kidnapping and abduction wouldn’t have been used, as the enslaved individuals were often regarded as mere animals and treated accordingly.
The Middle Passage was more than just a transportation route; it was a tragic part of a broader system of human exploitation. Picture 1.8 million individuals—mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, grandparents, children, farmers, artisans, soldiers, religious practitioners, merchants, community leaders, and everyday people just living their lives—before violence abruptly changed everything. They had names, languages, families, beliefs, memories, hopes, fears, and identities. Many didn't know where they were being taken, and many never saw land again.
The statistics can sometimes grow so large that they feel emotionally distant. That's one of the challenges with historical memory. Saying "1.8 million died" is impactful, but our minds can find it hard to truly grasp such a huge number. That's why it's so important to connect these figures to personal stories, archaeological finds, ship records, African histories, shipwrecks, acts of resistance, and the voices of descendants, making the history more relatable and real.
The Smithsonian's Slave Wrecks Project highlights that over 12 million Africans were enslaved during the transatlantic slave trade, with around 1,000 slave ships wrecking while crossing the Atlantic. Discovering and studying these wrecks helps us connect with a history that was once mostly known through written records. ([Smithsonian Institution][2]) And the approximately 1.8 million who died during the crossing were not the only victims.
It's crucial to remember that the 1.8 million figure mainly counts those who tragically lost their lives during the ocean voyage of the Middle Passage. However, it doesn't include the many others who died beforehand—during capture, forced marches, while in coastal holding facilities, or after arriving in the Americas. Recognizing this helps us understand the full extent of the tragic toll of the Atlantic slave trade.
Many individuals faced tragic fates during this brutal period. Some lost their lives resisting capture, while others succumbed to starvation, disease, exhaustion, violence, or injuries even before reaching the ships. Still, others passed away in the ports where they were held, awaiting transportation. After arriving, many suffered and died due to harsh working conditions, lack of nutrition, illness, punishment, and the breaking apart of families and communities. As a result, the true human cost of the transatlantic slave system was far greater than just those who died during the Middle Passage.
This distinction really matters because slavery wasn’t just a single event; it was a long-lasting system that persisted for centuries. According to the Oxford Research Encyclopedia, around 12.5 million enslaved Africans were forcibly taken from various coastal regions of Africa over more than three hundred years. This immense scale and long duration make it one of the biggest forced migrations in human history. Similarly, the National Endowment for the Humanities highlights the transatlantic slave trade as the largest forced migration the world has ever seen.
Yet many Americans learn about slavery primarily as a chapter between the American Revolution and the Civil War. That presentation can unintentionally shrink an international, centuries-long catastrophe into a relatively brief episode in American history.
The Holocaust occupies a unique place in modern historical consciousness. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum defines the Holocaust as the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million European Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators between 1933 and 1945. ([United States Holocaust Memorial Museum][4])
The Holocaust is widely documented and studied, and it is commemorated in museums all around the world. Each victim has been personally remembered through names, photographs, diaries, testimonies, artifacts, memorials, and scholarly works. Remembering the Holocaust is very important. The six million Jewish victims hold a special place in our memory. Equally, the Roma and Sinti, people with disabilities, political prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, and other victims of Nazi persecution all deserve to be remembered with care and respect.
It's important to remember that sometimes, focusing on one atrocity might be used as an excuse to overlook another. The goal isn't to diminish the significance of the Holocaust, but to broaden our understanding of human suffering in all its forms. While the Holocaust and the transatlantic slave trade are different historical events—happening in different contexts, under different systems, and during different times—they are both devastating and significant. The Holocaust was a concentrated genocide carried out by a modern state in the 1930s and 1940s, while the transatlantic slave trade spanned over three centuries, involving many European empires, African leaders, merchants, shipowners, plantation societies, and governments across the Atlantic. Remember, different circumstances don’t make these tragedies any less important or the lives affected any less valuable.
Use the word "suppressed" carefully. We have a wealth of research on the Middle Passage. Major databases have mapped out thousands of voyages, and archaeologists are actively uncovering slave-ship wrecks. Historians keep exploring topics like African resistance, revolts on ships, mortality rates, disease, gender, economics, and the personal stories of enslaved individuals. So, it wouldn’t be fair to say that all historians have hidden the Middle Passage. I do think some historians may have been influenced by bias. Back then, their authority and background in history often went unquestioned. Still, there’s strong evidence that the topic of slavery has not always been taught thoroughly in American schools. That’s worth reflecting on.
A Southern Poverty Law Center investigation revealed that many high school students struggle to answer basic questions about slavery. Teachers shared concerns about the quality of textbooks and the lack of enough support. The study also pointed out that many textbooks often miss out on fully telling the stories of enslaved people and tend to avoid directly discussing how slavery, racism, and white supremacy are connected. ([Southern Poverty Law Center][5])
Academic research has found similar patterns. A 2026 study of U.S. history textbooks used in Florida from 2005 to 2024 revealed that the language often focused on white participants, with less room given to Black voices and experiences. The researchers also noted that some word choices could hide responsibility for racial violence. ([ScienceDirect][6])
This is where the idea of historical suppression really comes into play—not necessarily as a big secret plot, but as a pattern in which uncomfortable history gets softened, shortened, depersonalized, or disconnected from its true impacts. Think about the difference between saying: "Africans were brought to America as slaves" and saying: “European and American commercial interests participated in a system that forcibly captured, purchased, transported, sold, and exploited millions of Africans, while governments and institutions created laws protecting the system." The first description doesn’t clearly tell us who was responsible. The second version highlights the system and the people and institutions that benefited from it. Words really do matter. Researchers have found that textbooks have historically downplayed slavery, and scholars have shown how earlier American textbooks sometimes avoided the topic altogether or portrayed slavery in a way that favored enslavers. ([Taylor & Francis Online][7])
Why Was Slavery So Difficult to Teach Honestly? One reason is that slavery played a significant role in shaping the development of the United States and the Western Atlantic economy. It's difficult to talk about American prosperity without acknowledging this connection. Cotton, tobacco, rice, sugar, shipping, banking, insurance, manufacturing, trade, land acquisitions, and political influence were all intertwined with slavery in many ways. Rather than being just an unfortunate social practice on the edges of society, it was a foundational economic and political institution.
That makes the subject uncomfortable. It means that the story is not simply about individual people behaving badly. It involves governments, laws, businesses, churches, courts, financial institutions, families, and communities. It also means that slavery cannot be reduced to a story about the South alone. The Atlantic slave economy was international.
Another reason is the development of historical narratives after emancipation. Following the Civil War, powerful interpretations such as the Lost Cause mythology sought to portray slavery as secondary to other causes of the conflict and to romanticize the antebellum South. Historians have documented how such interpretations influenced textbooks and public memory. Harvard historian Donald Yacovone has described how twentieth-century textbooks sometimes portrayed slavery positively while marginalizing African American scholarship and testimony. ([Harvard Gazette][8]) This is not simply a question of old textbooks. Historical memory can persist long after the original political circumstances disappear.
There's an important difference between remembering and comparing. It's understandable to argue that the Middle Passage deserves more recognition, but equating it directly with the Holocaust needs careful consideration. The Holocaust has a well-defined historical meaning, while the transatlantic slave trade was a different system altogether. Scholars should be cautious about merging different atrocities just because they caused immense suffering. However, comparisons can still help us understand these events better.
Looking at different atrocities together helps societies see common patterns like dehumanization, racial ideology, economic exploitation, political power, propaganda, forced displacement, family separation, violence, resistance, and institutionalized inequality. The important lesson isn't about asking, "Which tragedy was worse?" but about understanding, "What made people believe others were expendable?" That’s the key question linking these histories.
The Middle Passage truly deserves more acknowledgment because it symbolizes a tremendous human tragedy that reshaped the demographic, economic, political, and cultural landscapes across many continents. Africa felt the impact deeply, while Europe gained wealth through Atlantic trade. The Caribbean and the Americas underwent profound transformations, and the United States changed significantly. African American culture emerged from the incredible struggle of people who endured a system created to strip them of their freedom, family unity, political influence, and human dignity. This tragedy is not just a chapter in African American history; it’s a part of our shared world history. This shift is vital to how we approach historical education. The Middle Passage deserves more than just being seen as a prelude to American slavery; it should be recognized and studied as a significant international historical event.
Students should explore where enslaved Africans originated from, how they were captured, who played a part in their transportation, and how the ships worked. It's important to understand what happened on those ships, why so many lives were lost, and how Africans resisted the brutality. They resisted in many ways—they fought back on ships, escaped, and held onto their languages, religions, music, food traditions, family bonds, and cultural practices. Out of these struggles, they built new communities and fought tirelessly for freedom. Their descendants also carried this fight forward through abolition, Reconstruction, civil rights movements, voting rights, and numerous cultural and political achievements.
Perhaps the most heartbreaking injustice isn't that some tragedies are remembered more than others, but that humanity still struggles with the painful tendency to rank suffering based on race, nationality, geography, or political significance. We must remember the six million Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust—it’s vital they are never forgotten. Equally important are the approximately 1.8 million Africans who lost their lives during the Middle Passage, along with countless other innocent victims whose lives were torn apart by capture, forced migration, slavery, disease, violence, exploitation, and the long-lasting oppression that followed. True honor doesn't come from forgetting one tragedy or diminishing another. It's about recognizing the inherent value of every human life—the Holocaust and slavery are both solemn reminders of our shared humanity.
The historical record clearly shows that the Middle Passage was a significant part of history. Around 12.5 million Africans were forced onto ships, with approximately 10.7 million surviving the journey across the Atlantic. That leaves about 1.8 million whose lives were lost. ([NEH][1]) Beneath these numbers are real people—individuals, not just cargo or statistics, but human beings.
The real challenge, therefore, is not determining whether the Middle Passage was "as bad" as the Holocaust. History is not a competition in suffering. The challenge is ensuring that the memory of African suffering is given the seriousness, institutional attention, educational depth, and human dignity it deserves. Perhaps the question we should ask future generations is not, "Why wasn't the Middle Passage remembered like the Holocaust?" Perhaps we should ask: "Why did it take so long for the world to fully recognize the humanity of the people who suffered through it?" When history is taught honestly, memory becomes more than remembrance. It becomes responsibility. And if history teaches us anything, it is that whenever a society permits another human being to be reduced to property, race, statistics, stereotypes, or an inconvenience, the door to cruelty has already been opened. Our generation's responsibility is to keep that door closed.
Sources:
[1]: https://www.neh.gov/project/transatlantic-slave-trade-database “The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database”
[2]: https://global.si.edu/projects/slave-wrecks-project “Slave Wrecks Project”
[3]: https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/61663/chapter-abstract/553397438 Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History | Oxford Academic
[4]: https://www.ushmm.org/teach/fundamentals/holocaust-questions Frequently Asked Questions about the Holocaust for Educators - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
[5]: https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/teaching-hard-history Teaching Hard History
[6]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0898589826000690 “African slavery was becoming an essential part”: Examining language, agency, and power in the representation of enslavement in U.S. history textbooks - ScienceDirect
[7]: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0046760X.2021.1998650 "Slavery, market censorship and US antebellum schoolbook publishing: History of Education: Vol 51 , No 2 - Get Access"
[8]: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/09/harvard-historian-examines-how-textbooks-taught-white-supremacy/"Harvard historian examines how textbooks taught white supremacy — Harvard Gazette"
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