Tribute to the Ancestors of the Middle Passage
All photos by Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, 2018 and 2019
Speaking at the 1989 National Black Storytellers Conference at Brooklyn’s Medgar Evers College, writer-activist Toni Cade Bambara made a plea.
“I know we must reclaim those bones in the Atlantic Ocean,” she told the crowd. “Do you know there is not a plaque or memorial, a day, an hour that is erected in memory of those 100 million bodies in the bellows deep?”
Her words inspired the ceremonial remembrance now known as the Tribute to the Ancestors of the Middle Passage, held annually on Coney Island. The organizers — the People of the Sun Middle Passage Collective — held their first oceanside tribute in November of that same year. Saturday, June 13, 2020 marks 31 years of this tradition, which takes place every second Saturday in June to remember what millions of enslaved Africans went through. The event also honors those who have recently crossed over.
The program starts on the Boardwalk with a libations ceremony, followed by remarks from faith leaders and politicians, drumming and dancing. The community then marches to the beach for the laying of flowers at the tip of the Atlantic Ocean, the largest gravesite for our ancestors.
With crashing waves accompanying songs and rhythms of memory, the tribute makes space for a variety of practices, including traditional Yoruba spirituality. Dressed in white and wearing colorful ileke beads, attendees sing hymns of praise to the orishas. Grateful acknowledgement of spirit outweighs the grief.
Although the ceremony has been a Brooklyn mainstay for decades, this year is especially poignant as we mourn Black lives lost to COVID-19 and police brutality. In light of social distancing restrictions, rather than gather on Coney Island, the Collective is calling on the community to participate from wherever you are on Saturday at noon by pouring libations for our ancestors. For more information, follow the People of the Sun Middle Passage Collective on Facebook. —By Antoinette Isama
