The Afro-Brazilian music and dance, rooted in the rhythms of enslaved Africans and their descendants, in candomble worship and African circle dances, with deep roots in Bahia and a modern urban form that crystallized in Rio de Janeiro -- once raided by police as the disreputable culture of the favela, then within a generation embraced as the very sound of Brazil, the soul of Carnival, and one of the most joyful and widely loved musical forms on earth, even as the Black Brazilians who created it remained marginalized.
In Rio in the 1910s, police raided and harassed poor Black gatherings, treating drumming, dance, capoeira, and vagrancy as threats to public order. That music was samba. Within a single generation the same nation that criminalized it had crowned it the sound of Brazil, the heartbeat of Carnival, and the proof of a people who had supposedly mixed into one. The irony runs to the bone: a country fell in love with an art born in the slave quarters while the Black Brazilians who made it stayed shut out of the prosperity their music helped sell to the world.