Black Political Protest in São Paulo, 1888–1988

Beginning with Brazil's origins as a nation, and continuing to the present, the relationship between race and politics in that country has been a close and integral one. Portuguese state policy made black slavery the very foundation of Brazil's social and economic order during three centuries of colonial rule. That foundation remained in place even after independence, with the paradoxical result that Brazil became ‘the last Christian country to abolish slavery, and the first to declare itself a racial democracy’. Indeed, perhaps nowhere is the connection between race and politics in Brazil more evident than in the concept of ‘racial democracy’, which characterises race relations in that country in explicitly political terminology.This article explores some of the connections between race and politics in Brazil by examining four moments in the history of black political mobilisation in that country. Geographically, it focuses on the south-eastern state of São Paulo, which by the time of emancipation, in 1888, housed the third-largest slave population in Brazil (after neighbouring Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro), and which has formed a centre of black political action from the 1880s through to the present. Chronologically, it focuses on: the struggle for the final abolition of slavery in the 1880s; the rise and fall of the Frente Negra Brasileira in the 1930s; the black organisations of the Second Republic; and the most recent wave of black protest, from the mid-1970s to 1988.The purpose of such an exercise is twofold. First, placing these moments of black mobilisation in a century-long time-frame makes it possible for us to see them not as isolated episodes, but as chapters in a long-term, ongoing history of black protest and struggle in Brazil.