Tiffany Dena Loftin stood barefoot inside a slave dungeon at Cape Coast Castle in Ghana and cried. A tour guide was explaining the horrific conditions captured Africans endured inside those walls more than 400 years ago.

Black bodies were chained together; women on one side, men on the other. There was no toilet or light or water, and little air. Food was thrown onto the floor through a tiny slit in the wall. The small dungeons were hot and dark, each crowded with as many as 100 bodies steeped in blood, sweat, tears and human waste. Those who did not survive the horrific conditions were thrown into the Atlantic Ocean and eaten by sharks.

White chalk markings on the walls three or four feet high were left by the archaeologists who had to dig through centuries-old piles of dirt, food and human remains to get to the bottom of the dungeon.

“They had to live in their own filth, sleep in it for months,” said Loftin, 30. “(Slave traders) didn’t even consider us human beings.”

She took off her shoes in the dungeon to feel the floor underneath her feet where so many Africans had suffered. Overwhelmed, she broke down and cried. A tour guide, Michael Orleans, comforted her.

“He told me, ‘I want you in your tears to recognize that your ancestors who fought, struggled and died are rejoicing because the journey that they could not complete to return back home, they used you to do it. They used you to finish the journey that they could not finish. Welcome home,’” remembers Loftin. “I cannot tell you how powerful that moment was to me.”

Loftin, director of the NAACP’s Youth and College Division, was part of a nearly 300-person delegation from the organization that visited Ghana last August in celebration of the country’s Year of Return. The NAACP’s journey started in Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English colony, less than an hour’s drive from where the “20 and odd” Africans landed at Point Comfort in 1619.

“For 400 years we have been here, building, participating, liberating as well as making democracy work,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson told the crowd in Jamestown as they prayed and held rituals to honor the ancestors. “We are embarking on this journey in this 'Sankofa' moment to understand the ground we stand on.” (The term Sankofa is of Ghanaian origin and relates to the concept of finding wisdom in the past and bringing it into the present.)