PRESS RELEASE
Harvard University Honors Brazilian Activist Marielle Franco with the 2025 W.E.B. Du Bois Medal
Cambridge, MA – October 31, 2025
On Tuesday, November 4, 2025, the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal, Harvard University’s highest honor in the field of African and African American Studies, will be awarded to seven distinguished honorees. Among them, for the first time ever, will be a public figure from Brazil: the late Marielle Franco. She is only the second person from Latin America to receive this distinction, following last year’s award to Colombia’s Vice President Francia Márquez.
The W.E.B. Du Bois Medal recognizes individuals in the United States and around the world for their contributions to African and Afrodescendant culture and intellectual life. Past recipients include scholars, artists, writers, journalists, philanthropists, and public servants whose work has strengthened and expanded the field of African and African American Studies.
Marielle Franco (1979–2018) became an activist against police violence and militarization early in life after losing a friend to a stray bullet during one of the many militarized police operations that claim hundreds of lives each year in Rio de Janeiro. Active for years in community organizations in Maré, she later coordinated the Commission for the Defense of Human Rights and Citizenship in Rio de Janeiro’s State Legislature. During that time, she was raising her daughter and had earned a degree in Social Sciences from PUC-Rio and a master’s in Public Administration from Universidade Federal Fluminense.
In 2016, Franco was elected to the City Council of Rio de Janeiro, becoming the only Black woman among 51 council members. There, she championed marginalized communities, denounced police brutality, and advocated for LGBTQIA+ and women’s rights. As is often the case for Afrodescendant public figures, her intellectual work informed and sustained her activism; her master’s thesis examined public security policy in the state of Rio de Janeiro.
In early 2018, in recognition of her exceptional contributions as both an activist and an intellectual, the Afro-Latin American Research Institute (ALARI) invited Franco to Harvard University to participate in a symposium titled “Afrodescendants in Brazil: Achievements, Present Challenges, and Perspectives for the Future,” held on April 27, 2018. Six weeks before the event, and just one day after publicly questioning the ongoing “war” waged by the police against her own community, Marielle Franco was assassinated along with her driver, Anderson Gomes, after participating in a panel titled “Young Black Women Moving Power Structures.”
“Indeed, it is because women like her have challenged and transformed power structures in the face of racism, sexism, and LGBTQIA+ phobia, because of her success, that her precious life was taken,” said Alejandro de la Fuente, ALARI’s founding director and presenter of Marielle Franco’s Harvard award. “But what I want to emphasize here today is that they failed. Her assassins and their vile sponsors failed. Marielle was with us during our symposium; they could not erase her. They failed. Marielle did come to ALARI, and after that, she never left.”
De la Fuente continued:
“Ours is a field, that of Afro-Latin American Studies, in which knowledge production is fed by struggles for justice and inclusion, nurtured by women like Marielle. You cannot kill that. Marielle Franco is life; you cannot kill life. That is why her legacy is here with us today at Harvard, to celebrate life. I am speaking in the present tense.”