More than 3.5 million slaves were imported to Brazil during the slavery era, more than to any colony in the Americas. Although the slave trade had been officially outlawed in Brazil in 1831, tens of thousands of slaves continued to be imported over the next 50 years. On May 13, 1888, Brazil became the last nation in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery. In 1890 all official papers and documents relating to the Brazilian slave trade were ordered burned. Today, only Nigeria has a larger black population than Brazil.

From Jubilee: The Emergence of African-American Culture, by Howard Dodson, published by National Geographic Books (February 2003) in association with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

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