Why is Brazil’s Black Consciousness Day on November 20?

Two dates for one history

Brazil ended slavery by law on May 13, 1888, when Princess Isabel, ruling as regent, signed the Lei Áurea, the “Golden Law.” For a long time that was the date the country remembered. Today it has a second one, and the second is now the national holiday: November 20, the National Day of Zumbi and Black Consciousness.

The two dates tell the story from opposite ends. May 13 marks a signature at a palace in Rio. November 20 marks the death of a man who refused captivity two centuries earlier. Zumbi led Palmares, a group of free villages in the hills of northeastern Brazil, after turning down a deal that would have returned runaways to slavery. He held out until the stronghold fell, and on November 20, 1695, betrayed by a captured companion, he was killed. His life is told in Who was Zumbi dos Palmares?.

A poet’s group in Porto Alegre

The idea came from the far south of Brazil, a long way from Palmares. In 1971, in the city of Porto Alegre, a circle around the poet Oliveira Silveira, who called themselves the Grupo Palmares, proposed that Black Brazilians stop centering their memory on May 13 and remember Zumbi instead. For the group, the choice of date was a choice of hero: a law handed down from above, or a fight waged from below.

The proposal spread. In 1978 the Unified Black Movement, the Movimento Negro Unificado, took it up, and November 20 became a day of rallies and debates across the country, long before any law recognized it.

From a commemorative day to a holiday

The state caught up in steps. In 1996, on the three hundredth anniversary of his death, Law 9.315 entered Zumbi’s name in the Book of Heroes of the Nation. In 2011 a federal law put the date on the official calendar:

The National Day of Zumbi and Black Consciousness is established, to be celebrated every year on 20 November, the date of the death of the Black leader Zumbi dos Palmares.

That law created a commemorative day, not a day off. Whether people stayed home on November 20 depended on where they lived, since some states and cities had made it a local holiday and others had not. Law 14.759 of 2023 settled it, making November 20 a holiday across all of Brazil, 328 years after Zumbi’s death.

What each date remembers now

Brazil now keeps both. May 13 remembers the law. November 20 remembers Zumbi and everyone who fought slavery, from the runaways of Palmares to the people who fled the coffee farms by the thousands in 1887. Whether May 13 belongs to the princess or to those who forced the issue is its own question, answered in Did Princess Isabel end slavery in Brazil?.

In Rio, at the Valongo wharf, where about 900,000 enslaved Africans were landed, women dressed in white come to wash the old stones. The two dates sit six months apart, and each one gives its own answer to the question of who ended slavery.