The Trump Administration recently cut funding to the 400 Years of African American History Commission. Another cut targeted the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana and its planned exhibit on resistance to slavery, which had been in the works for three years and was planned to open January 2026. Along with book bans and anti-DEI pronouncements, these efforts threaten to scrub or rewrite the history of slavery and racism in the United States.

Such efforts can do serious damage to our understanding of history. Still, they are not likely to succeed in suppressing the truth. The remarkable history of Palmares, a society formed by Africans who escaped slavery in 17th-century Brazil, points to the negative impact politics can have on historical memory and writing. The history and memory of Palmares also reveals that people can resist attempts to erase hard truths about slavery.

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The Portuguese arrived in modern-day Brazil in 1500, establishing coastal settlements. In 1534, they established the Captaincy of Pernambuco, in the Northeast of the country. They brought enslaved captives from Africa to labor in a burgeoning sugar industry. Pernambuco’s plantations soon became key engines in a vast and brutal slave empire, the largest in the history of the Atlantic trade. Almost immediately, some enslaved people fled their captivity and established small communities in the interior, in a region that came to be called Palmares. These settlements, known as "maroon communities" in much of the Americas, were called "quilombos" or "mocambos" in Brazil.

Read More: The Burning of Nottoway Plantation

From 1630 to 1654, the Dutch invaded and occupied parts of Portuguese Pernambuco, including the lands near Palmares, which withstood withering attacks from the Dutch and Portuguese. During the war, thousands of enslaved people fled and went to Palmares, which eventually had a population that may have exceeded 10,000 or more. It survived for most of the 17th century, despite ongoing attacks by Portuguese seeking to recapture enslaved people and........

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