This piece is a companion to “Seeds of Marielle: Black Brazil, the Favelas and the 2026 Election,” one of the stories in the debut issue of [Black Thread](/magazine), arriving November 1.
On October 25, 2026, Brazilians return to the polls to choose between President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, 80, and Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, 45, the eldest son of the former president now serving a 27-year prison sentence. Flávio finished first in the October 4 first round with 47.03 percent of valid votes to Lula's 45.16 percent. For the more than 112 million Brazilians who identify as Black or pardo (mixed race), the choice carries the weight of five centuries.
A Nation Built by the Middle Passage
No country in the Americas received more enslaved Africans than Brazil: about 4.9 million people landed on its shores between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. They cut sugarcane in Pernambuco and Bahia, mined gold in Minas Gerais and picked coffee in São Paulo. They also resisted. In the hills of Alagoas, the runaway community of Palmares held off Portuguese and Dutch forces for most of the seventeenth century. Its last leader, Zumbi, was killed on November 20, 1695; that date is now Black Consciousness Day, a national holiday.
Growing by the Slave Ship
After Palmares fell, the trade only quickened. Brazil's planters relied on fresh arrivals from Africa rather than on enslaved families growing in number, so the Black population grew mainly through importation. The great ports were Salvador da Bahia, Recife in Pernambuco and, above all, Rio de Janeiro, which became the largest slave port in the Americas when gold and then coffee drew captives inland to Minas Gerais and the Paraíba Valley. Far to the south, in Rio Grande do Sul, enslaved men worked the cattle ranches and the charqueadas, the salted-beef plants of Pelotas.
A law of 1831 banned the trade on paper, but it was so widely ignored that Brazilians called it a law "for the English to see." Only the Eusébio de Queirós Law of September 4, 1850, passed under heavy British naval pressure, finally ended the Atlantic trade. By the first national census in 1872, Brazil counted about 1.5 million enslaved people, and free people of African descent already outnumbered them several times over.
Those Africans, Yoruba, Fon, Bantu-speaking peoples from Angola and the Congo, and Muslim Hausa and Nagô, remade Brazil. In Salvador, enslaved Muslims led the Malê Revolt of 1835. From them came Candomblé in Bahia, Xangô and maracatu in Pernambuco, Batuque in Rio Grande do Sul, and capoeira and samba in Rio. Black brotherhoods built churches, pooled money to buy freedom and buried their dead with dignity. The Free Womb Law (1871) and the Sexagenarian Law (1885) chipped away at slavery until the Golden Law of May 13, 1888, ended it. Brazil was the last nation in the Americas to do so. Freedom came with no land, no wages owed and no schools.
Whitening and the Myth of Racial Democracy
The new republic, founded in 1889, set out to "whiten" the nation. São Paulo paid the passage of millions of Italian, Portuguese and Spanish immigrants to work the coffee farms, and an 1890 decree barred African and Asian immigrants without congressional approval. Freed people and their children were pushed to the edges, into the hillside settlements that became the favelas.
In 1933, the sociologist Gilberto Freyre published Casa-Grande & Senzala (The Masters and the Slaves), which praised Brazil's racial mixing. His ideas hardened into the claim that Brazil was a "racial democracy," free of the color line found in the United States. The claim did real work: if racism did not exist, there was nothing to fix, and Black organizing could be dismissed as divisive. Black Brazilians answered anyway, through the Frente Negra Brasileira (1931) and Abdias do Nascimento's Black Experimental Theater (1944). In the 1950s, UNESCO-sponsored studies by Florestan Fernandes and others documented deep inequality, and the military regime that ruled from 1964 to 1985 treated talk of racism as subversion. In 1978, activists founded the Unified Black Movement (MNU) on the steps of São Paulo's Municipal Theater.
The 1990s: Brazil Names Its Racism
The 1988 centennial of abolition and the new constitution opened the door. The 1989 Caó Law spelled out racism as a crime. On November 20, 1995, the 300th anniversary of Zumbi's death, some 30,000 people joined the Zumbi dos Palmares March in Brasília. President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, himself a sociologist of race, became the first president to say publicly that Brazil had a racism problem and created a working group on Black Brazilians. That shift, and the 2001 United Nations conference against racism in Durban, South Africa, set the stage for the first university quotas in Rio de Janeiro and Bahia in the early 2000s.
Where Afro-Brazilians Stand Today
The numbers tell a different story. In the 2022 census, 55.5 percent of Brazilians identified as Black or pardo. Yet Black Brazilians average 8.9 years of schooling against 10.3 for white Brazilians, according to the national statistics agency, IBGE. In 2024, police killed 6,243 people; 82 percent of them were Black, according to the Brazilian Public Security Forum.
The Black movement turned those facts into law. The 1988 constitution made racism a crime and recognized the land rights of quilombos, the communities descended from runaways. In 2003, Lula's first government required Afro-Brazilian and African history in schools and created a cabinet-level office for racial equality. The Racial Equality Statute followed in 2010, and in 2012 President Dilma Rousseff signed the law reserving half the seats in federal universities for public-school students, with shares for Black, pardo and Indigenous applicants. A generation of Black doctors, lawyers and teachers has since come through those doors.
The murder of Marielle Franco, a Black councilwoman from the Maré favela complex in Rio de Janeiro, on March 14, 2018, showed how dangerous it remained to speak for that majority.
A Child on the Bus in Alemão
In the favelas, the danger reaches children. On the night of September 20, 2019, eight-year-old Ágatha Félix was riding public transportation through Rio's Complexo do Alemão when a police officer's bullet struck her in the back. Police said they had come under attack; witnesses said there was no shootout, only an officer firing at two men on a motorcycle. Hundreds protested in Alemão the next night, and the favela newspaper Voz das Comunidades led a march of children carrying yellow balloons behind a banner that read "Stop Killing Us." Governor Wilson Witzel, an ally of Bolsonaro who had promised to "slaughter criminals," defended the "shoot first" approach. Police in Rio state killed 1,249 people in the first eight months of that year, at least five a day, as HistorianSpeaks founder Stephen G. Hall reported at the time for The North Star. The question of who controls the police, and whom they protect, is on the ballot again in 2026.
The Rise and Fall of Jair Bolsonaro
Jair Bolsonaro, a retired army captain and longtime congressman, won the presidency in 2018 on promises to crush crime and corruption. Lula, the front-runner, was barred from the race after a corruption conviction that the Supreme Court annulled in 2021. Bolsonaro's record on race was already public. In a 2017 speech, he mocked residents of a quilombo as too heavy and idle to work; he was charged with racism and acquitted.
In office, he placed the Palmares Cultural Foundation, the federal agency for Black culture, under Sérgio Camargo, a journalist who denied that structural racism existed in Brazil. Official recognition of quilombo communities fell 75 percent in his first three years. His handling of COVID-19, which killed Black and poor Brazilians at higher rates, drew global condemnation.
He lost to Lula in 2022 and left for Florida. On January 8, 2023, his supporters stormed Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidential palace in Brasília. In September 2025, the Supreme Court convicted Bolsonaro of leading a plot to overturn the election and sentenced him to 27 years. He is in prison, and his son now carries the family name onto the ballot.
Lula's Appeal
Lula, a former metalworker and union leader born poor in Pernambuco, remains the only Brazilian president who grew up poor in the Northeast. His Bolsa Família cash-transfer program, aimed at the poorest families, reached millions of Black households, and his first two terms lifted tens of millions into the lower middle class. In his third term, he created the Ministry of Racial Equality, led by Anielle Franco, Marielle's sister, and in November 2023 he signed a law making the university quotas permanent and expanding them to graduate programs.
Critics on the left note that police killings have stayed high under Lula, since most police answer to state governors, and that Black Brazilians remain scarce in the cabinet and the courts.
What Each Candidate Offers
Lula's government plan, registered with the electoral court, spreads racial-equality proposals across education, health and public safety. It promises violence prevention aimed at Black youth and stronger quotas in public-service hiring. Flávio Bolsonaro's plan contains no specific measures against racism, according to reviews by the Black news site Alma Preta and others. In the Senate, he filed an amendment to replace racial quotas in federal universities with income-only quotas, while saying he favored fighting racism "with education and with punishment." His campaign speaks instead of crime, a smaller government and new Supreme Court justices.
Why the Runoff Matters
For Afro-Brazilians, the runoff is not only a contest between left and right. It is a vote on whether the gains won since 1988, quotas, quilombo land and a ministry devoted to racial equality, will be defended or dismantled. The descendants of Palmares are the majority of Brazil's voters. On October 25, they will help decide which history the country chooses to continue. As we say at HistorianSpeaks, the past is present.
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