Up From Slavery: Afro-Brazilian Activism in São Paulo, 1888–1938*

Throughout the centuries of slavery in the Americas and the Caribbean, Africans and their descendants struggled against a social system that sought to reduce them to chattel. They found that their struggle was to continue, albeit in different forms, long after abolition. In Brazil, emancipation in 1888 was followed the next year by the demise of imperial government and the installation of the First Republic. This created a new political and legal framework for Afro-Brazilians to negotiate positions in society. Racial relations in former slave societies are not the simple result of imposed identities and social spaces by a dominant group upon an oppressed group. They evolve from a dialectical power struggle in which blacks as well as whites affect the outcome.

In the fifty years after final emancipation, Afro-Brazilians in the burgeoning industrial metropolis of São Paulo had created a nexus of racially organized activism by the 1930s, producing a prolific black press and the first national Afro-Brazilian advocacy organization. This paper explores the nature and significance of that activism, largely overlooked in Brazilian historiography.

Many white Brazilians heralded the early twentieth century as the dawn of a “racial democracy,” which was to be achieved through miscegenation.¹ Whites–and many Afro-Brazilians–traditionally considered mulattoes and blacks to be distinct ethnicities.² Prejudices rooted in slavery held that blacks were inferior; the infusion of white “superior” blood through miscegenation was considered an improvement. Thus, mulattoes enjoyed a greater level of acceptance and participation than darker-skinned blacks in mainstream Brazilian society. Eugenicists explicitly decried the African heritage as an impediment to civilization, and advocated miscegenation as a means to rid Brazil of blacks entirely. “The white element of the population will after a time displace the elements which might retain any of the characteristics of the Negro,” wrote the director of the National Museum in 1911. “Brazil will then become one of the chief centres of civilisation in the world.”³ The political argument held that Afro-Brazilians had full equality of opportunity because of the absence of discriminatory legislation and overt racial animosity (especially in comparison with the United States). The racial democracy myth was inextricably linked to the supremacist position of the eugenicists through its implication that if Afro-Brazilians failed to advance, it was due to the inherent inferiority of African blood.

People of African descent not only felt the need to reconceptualize their own identity; they assumed the task of reshaping the social meanings of race in Brazil. This was the struggle of a small segment of the Afro-Brazilian community. I use the term “community” here to refer to the aggregate of Afro-Brazilians because the individual and collective actions of other members of the community contributed significantly to the shaping of the social identity of each individual. Nonetheless, this aggregate should be understood as a multiplicity of smaller communities with sometimes conflicting ideologies and identities. Diverse in education, income, culture, religion and other factors, it cannot be assumed that all blacks and/or mulattoes shared the same ideologies and interests as others of their color. The only universal characteristic shared by Afro-Brazilians was some degree of African descent.

Yet despite their relatively small numbers, the activists in the post-abolition years made a decision that was to become an important tenet of Afro-Brazilian political philosophy throughout the century. They chose to reject the traditional distinction between blacks and mulattoes, assuming instead a negro ethnic identity which incorporated all of the many color categories of people of African descent. My use of the term “black” here, interchangeably with “Afro-Brazilian,” roughly corresponds to this usage of negro. The politically strategic use of negro identity was a prerequisite for creating a power base among a potentially large constituency.

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Afro-Brazilians had first become a significant presence in the state of São Paulo in the nineteenth century, with the advent of large-scale cultivation of coffee for export. As coffee assumed a central role in the Brazilian economy the central-south region replaced the northeast...