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.