The publication of this work is timely as it presents the factors that led to the permanence of black students at the Teacher Training Centre (CPF) of the Federal University of Reconcavo da Bahia. By analysing the questions relating to what are/were the decisive factors for the inclusion of these black students in the UFRB and what were the conditions for these students to remain in higher education? Our focus was on the interface between the subject and belonging, a focus that brought us back to the multiple implications in the construction of identity and a sense of belonging, centred on the struggle of Afro-descendants in the academic sphere. This leads us to affirm that the association between blackness and university students will not go unnoticed between ethnic-racial relations and academic institutions, since over the centuries the relationship with these students has been that of researchers and objects of study, thus relating their life trajectory to their Afro-descendancy within institutions, making it clear that there are social, cultural and economic factors for the perception of themselves as Afro-descendants in a Brazilian society.