Rio’s Race to Future Intersects Slave Past - NYTimes.com

Rio is believed to have imported more slaves than any other city in the
Americas, outranking places like Charleston, S.C.; Kingston, Jamaica; and
Salvador in northeast Brazil. Altogether, Rio received more than 1.8 million African slaves, or 21.5 percent of all slaves who landed in the
Americas, said Mariana P. Candido, a historian at the University of
Kansas.



Slavery’s legacy is clear across Brazil, where more than half of its 200
million people define themselves as black or mixed race, giving the nation
more people of African descent than any other country outside Africa. In
Rio, the large majority of slaves came from what is now Angola, said
Walter Hawthorne, a historian at Michigan State University.
“Rio was a culturally vibrant African city,” Dr. Hawthorne said. “The
foods people ate, the way they worshiped, how they dressed and more were
to a large extent influenced by Angolan cultural norms.”



Rio’s Race to Future Intersects Slave Past - NYTimes.com