European and later American traders bought or captured people in West and Central Africa and shipped them to the Caribbean, Brazil, Spanish America and North America. The SlaveVoyages database at Rice University estimates that about 12.5 million people were embarked and about 10.7 million survived the voyage. Roughly 388,000 were brought directly to what became the United States.
The first recorded Africans in English Virginia arrived at Point Comfort in 1619. Congress banned importing enslaved people starting January 1, 1808, but the domestic slave trade grew after that. Traders forcibly moved about a million enslaved people from the upper South to the cotton states of the Deep South, splitting families in the process.
The trade built fortunes for shipping firms, banks and insurers in Europe and the US. It also produced the racial categories used to justify slavery. Calls for reparations, in the US and from Caribbean nations, point to this trade as the starting point of wealth built from Black labor.