4. Democracy

São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, 1945–1950

In 1945 growing opposition in Brazil helped bring down Getúlio Vargas's dictatorship, inaugurating a Second Republic (1946–64) that deepened and expanded Brazil's historically weak democratic institutions.¹ This transformation coincided with the Allied victory in World War II, which brought the end of totalitarian regimes in Europe and fueled enthusiasm for democracy across Latin America. In Brazil, democracy, and how it should be defined, became a central issue of national politics for the rest of the decade.

In the cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, black thinkers took full advantage of reinstated freedoms of speech and association to resume older organizations and publications, and to form new ones. Even the titles of their newspapers, like Alvorada (Dawn), Novo Horizonte (New Horizon), and Mundo Novo (New World), reflected the prevailing mood of hope and renewal. “In São Paulo, as in the rest of Brazil,” one postwar Paulistano black newspaper proclaimed, “the black man is in motion, trying to get back to the work of definitively conquering those fundamental citizenship rights . . . once dreamed of by our great family.”² Yet even as they returned, after a seven-year hiatus, to their long-standing project of publicly demanding full citizenship for Brazilians of color, black thinkers framed their politics of belonging in distinctly new terms. In place of an older language of fraternity or a more recent turn to nativist nationalism, their publications and public declarations made the language of democracy central to claims for racial inclusion.

The widespread currency of the ideal of democracy in postwar Brazil reflected significant transformations in ideas about both politics and race in the mid-1940s, nationally as well as abroad. The genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany had contributed to discrediting scientific racism along with totalitarianism in much of the West. In the wake of the Nazis’ defeat, a group of prominent organizations, leaders, and scholars in the emerging international community made the eradication of racism an integral component of the project to uphold democracy and human rights worldwide. As international organizations enlisted social scientists to address the problem of racism and to find models of harmonious race relations, Brazil, where antiracism had become state doctrine, received new visibility. It was in this context that Brazilian and foreign intellectuals, including black thinkers, restated an older idea of Brazilian racial harmony in the dominant political language of the times: Brazil's extensive mixture and lack of institutionalized racism made it a “racial democracy.” Prominent negro activist and sociologist Alberto Guerreiro Ramos voiced the sentiments of many of his fellow black thinkers when he claimed in 1950 that “Brazil should assume a leadership role in teaching the world the politics of racial democracy. Because it is the only country on earth that offers a satisfactory solution to the racial problem.”³

It was precisely this sort of sanguine endorsement of ideas of racial democracy that black thinkers in later years, looking back from the other side of a brutal military dictatorship that invoked racial democracy to silence dissent, would regret as naive or deeply compromised. Yet in the heady years following the end of the Estado Novo, widespread enthusiasm for new ideas about both race and democracy seemed to, and in many ways did, offer black thinkers in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro a more powerful set of tools with which to demand inclusion than earlier claims based on brotherhood or nativist nationalism. Institutionally, black thinkers in these cities seized the openings created by political democracy—like freedom of assembly and the press, a new constitution, expanded party politics, an emerging international consensus about human rights, and alliances with white politicians—to pursue and defend their participation, as black Brazilians, in the civic life of their nation. They used their new papers and organizations to promote black candidates, to encourage fellow Brazilians of color to vote, and to push for a law criminalizing racial discrimination. Rhetorically, black thinkers in this period also upheld racial equality as the ultimate test of Brazil's fledgling political democracy. As long as discrimination persisted, they argued, Brazil's much vaunted transition to democracy was incomplete.

Finally, in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, black intellectuals availed themselves of transformations in social scientific inquiry about race, and of alliances with progressive white intellectuals, to bolster their politics of inclusion. Unlike earlier in the century, when the social and medical sciences heavily underwrote ideas about black inferiority, much social scientific work in the postwar period was self-consciously opposed to scientific racism. Social science, in this context, provided black thinkers with new authority and a new logic through which to frame their claims for citizenship. In particular, an expanding field of sociological studies of Brazilian race relations appealed to Paulistano and Carioca black thinkers for its portrayal of negros in the cities of the Southeast as politically active protagonists of Brazil's modernity—a useful counterpoint to an earlier anthropological literature that had inconveniently, in their view, celebrated the primitive African cultures of blacks in the Northeast. Far from being dupes of a cynical elite political project, then, black thinkers at midcentury were vigorous participants, and major stakeholders, in the project of reframing long-standing ideas of Brazilian racial harmony as “racial democracy.”

“The black man is in motion”

In many ways, it was civil society, unevenly repressed during the Estado Novo, that finally brought down Vargas's dictatorship and ushered in a more democratic regime. In August 1942, Brazil declared war on the Axis, becoming one of the most prominent Latin American contributors to the Allied effort. Though this gesture raised Vargas's profile internationally, it contributed to eroding his power at home. Intellectuals, opposition politicians, and military officers in Brazil increasingly chafed at the contradiction between battling dictatorship in Europe and living in one themselves. As the Allies marched toward victory in Europe, Vargas's critics began to speak and act against his regime. Protest, initially confined to political oratory and intellectual manifestos, soon overflowed into public spaces.

This public pressure from a growing opposition, which drew legitimacy from international events, forced Vargas to prepare for a transition to democracy and gradually to ease the reins of power. Over the course of 1945, Vargas relaxed political censorship, allowed for voter registration, and prepared the nation for competitive elections that December. The electorate for this contest had expanded threefold since the previous election (1930), thanks to the electoral reform of 1932 that gave women the vote and lowered the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen. Over the course of 1945, three major and several minor political parties emerged. Two of the major parties were largely controlled by Vargas and drew on his still broad bases of support (which included many workers, peasants, civil servants, industrialists, and reformist military officers). A third major party, the União Democrática Nacional (UDN, or National Democratic Union), brought together conservative anti-Vargas politicians. In part because of the continuing loyalty that the many voters who had been excluded from national politics during the Republic still felt for the man who had given them a voice, one of Vargas's parties, the rural-based Partido Social Democrático (PSD, or Social Democratic Party), took 55 percent of the national vote and a majority in both houses of Congress. In January 1946 General Eurico Dutra, former minister of war and Vargas's preferred candidate, became the first president of Brazil's Second Republic.⁴

The political transformations that ended the Estado Novo and inaugurated a democratic Second Republic thus did not fully end Vargas's influence over national politics. But they marked a significant achievement in a nation that had limited experience with competitive elections and popular suffrage. The period after 1945 saw the growth of vigorous parties, a broad active electorate, and a respect by parties and candidates for electoral results. As important, in 1946 the new Congress sat as a Constituent Assembly charged with drafting a constitution and returning Brazil to the rule of law. Promulgated in September of that year, the constitution preserved a powerful executive but included some protections against its abuse, like strong legislative and judiciary branches.

In particular, the restitution of rights of political dissent and free speech marked a significant departure from the repressive Estado Novo. It was this aspect of the democratic opening, more than a uniformly shared ideological opposition to Vargas, that would unite black activists of different generations and political persuasions in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in the mid-1940s. In the wake of Vargas's fall, it was not just black thinkers identified with the previously persecuted Left who condemned the Estado Novo's suppression of formal black organizations and publications but also former members of the generally pro-Vargas Frente Negra. This shared rejection of Vargas's tactics (if not necessarily of his nationalist ideology) highlights a significant difference between the men of color who became politically active in race-based organizations after 1945 and the much broader population of Brazilians of color they aspired to represent. Well after Vargas's fall, many poor and working-class Brazilians of color continued to revere him as their benefactor, seeing his extension of jobs to black workers, his inclusion of poor people of color in political patronage networks, and his crackdown on immigrants as just restitution for a longer history of slavery and marginalization.⁵ Whereas most poor and working-class beneficiaries of Vargas's regime would therefore continue to work through the cross-racial parties and unions still associated with the deposed leader after 1945, the men who saw themselves as black thinkers and activists, regardless of their political sympathies, would instead invest their energy in rebuilding the kinds of race-based institutions and publications that the Estado Novo had shut down.⁶ This difference in approaches to social advancement—one defined by racial identity, the other couched within broader class-based, multiracial clientelistic networks—helps explain why the new black organizations that sprung up during this period, however energetic and ambitious, would not command the loyalties of most Brazilians of color.

The story of the rebirth of black activism in postwar São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro begins during the Estado Novo itself. As with civil society more generally, the Estado Novo had not succeeded in closing down all spaces of black politics, despite the state's suppression of explicitly political black organizations like the Frente Negra. Black activists and thinkers had continued to organize after 1937, though with a much lower profile. Some former members of the Frente Negra, as we saw in chapter 3, reconvened in cultural organizations dedicated to performing the sorts of Afro-Brazilian dances or carnival parades deemed acceptable by the regime. Others pursued causes that were more openly political in nature. Former O Clarim d'Alvorada editor José Correia Leite, whose memoirs provide one of the few sources of information on black organizing in São Paulo during Vargas's dictatorship, recalled that his home “became a sort of headquarters for the discussion of black issues” among dedicated writers and activists of color. Elsewhere, the Jabaquara Club, a Marxist-inspired group led by activist Luiz Lobato, brought together former writers for Clarim and former members of the Frente Negra. According to Leite, the Jabaquaras advocated the resolution of racial problems within a broader struggle for class equality and social justice.⁷ A larger group, the Associação José do Patrocínio, was founded in 1941 to continue aspects of the Frente Negra's work—particularly advocating for and protecting women of color who were domestic workers. The association, named after the famous nineteenth-century journalist and abolitionist of color, monitored and protested advertisements for domestic employment that specified a preference for white or light-skinned workers.⁸

These spaces of muted activism fueled a resurgence of black politics in São Paulo in the final months of the Estado Novo, as Vargas loosened his hold on power. They also provided opportunities for black thinkers to begin to reconcile the ideological differences that had proved so divisive in the previous decade. Toward the end of Vargas's dictatorship, Leite recalled, a group of former writers for Clarim, as well as former members of the Clube Negro de Cultura Social (CNCS, or Black Club for Social Culture) and the Frente Negra, began to meet at the downtown workplace of Raul Joviano do Amaral. In the early 1930s Leite and members of his group at Clarim had created the CNCS when they broke off from the Frente Negra due to personal and ideological differences with its leadership. In his youth Raul Amaral had joined the dissident CNCS and befriended Leite. But he subsequently left the CNCS for the Frente Negra, possibly yielding to pressures from his father, a staunch frentenegrino.⁹ Perhaps it was Amaral's status as a former member of both factions of São Paulo's black movement that positioned him to bring together veterans of the Clarim group, like Leite and his colleague Fernando Góis, with former leaders of the Frente, like Francisco Lucrécio. According to Leite, the new group convened to “try to recover the work we had lost since ’38,” referring to the date when the Estado Novo drew the curtain on black (and most other) independent political organizing in Brazil. After a series of meetings, Amaral, Leite, and the others resolved to create a new black organization, modeled after the principles and goals of the Frente Negra but tailored to the new democratic context. In 1945 the Associação do Negro Brasileiro (ANB, or Association of Black Brazilians) opened its doors, offering programs ranging from social assistance to sports, culture, arts, and a women's wing.¹⁰

In April 1945, as Vargas prepared to step down, the ANB's leaders laid out their goals in a “Manifesto in Defense of Democracy,” published in the Jornal de São Paulo. The document reveals how essential the ANB's leaders believed the return of liberal democracy to be for the pursuit of black politics. “The reactionary and Fascist measures adopted by the regime of 1937,” it began, “including the prohibition of political parties, censorship of the press, and limitations on freedom of assembly, have directly contributed to undermining the efforts of the Brazilian negro to integrate himself into the mainstream of national life.” Availing themselves of their new rights under a democratizing regime, the document's signers (Leite, Lucrécio, Amaral, Góis, and others) proclaimed their intention to “unite the negros of São Paulo in order to demand freedom of speech and freedom of assembly; combat all manifestations of racism in Brazil; . . . demand that labor laws be extended to include domestic servants and rural workers [most of them people of color]; fight for unconditional amnesty for all political prisoners; demand the elimination of racial discrimination in the military academies and in the diplomatic service; demand special penal legislation directed at these institutions and at individuals who discriminate; demand the freedom to unionize and the right to strike; [and] fight for universal education at all levels.”¹¹ In its concern with labor laws, unionization, universal education, and amnesty for political prisoners (most of whom were communists), the manifesto displays the leftist leanings of the ANB, shared by older members like Leite and, increasingly, by younger activists.¹² But beyond representing the specific concerns of the ANB, the manifesto, with its demands for racial equality framed in the language of democracy, political institutions, and legal rights, announced the broader changes in black formulations of belonging that would take place at midcentury. Calling for legislation against racist acts was different indeed from earlier antiracist claims based on interracial brotherhood or rights of native birth.

Along with the reinvigoration of black political and social organizations, the end of the repressive Estado Novo led to the rebirth of São Paulo's black press, which had fallen almost completely silent after 1937. As part of the statutes of the ANB, Leite, Amaral, and Góis had declared their intention “to reestablish the paper O Clarim d'Alvorada.” They fulfilled this goal in September 1945 with the appearance of Alvorada (so called to distinguish it from its predecessor).¹³Alvorada was soon joined by other papers, like the one founded in May 1946 by Aristides Barbosa. A former Frente Negra member, Barbosa had participated in several of the cultural groups that replaced the Frente after 1938, but he had grown disenchanted with their transformation into recreational clubs. A man who later described himself as an “intellectual” who had “completed secondary school” (revealing the rarity of a secondary education for black men in São Paulo at the time), Barbosa had greater ambitions. In the course of his work as a janitor in São Paulo's state aviation school, he met North American flight instructors who introduced him to the U.S. black magazine Ebony. That publication inspired Barbosa to gather together a group of former Frente members, along with veterans of São Paulo's early-twentieth-century black press (like poet Lino Guedes of Clarim) and younger writers (like journalist Geraldo Campos de Oliveira and poet Oswaldo Camargo), and to found his own black paper, O Novo Horizonte.¹⁴

Though many black thinkers, particularly from the vantage point of a democratizing Brazil in the mid-1940s, looked back on Vargas's dictatorship as a period that interrupted black militancy, it was under Vargas that pretos and pardos, and especially the less privileged among them, made many of the gains for which black thinkers had long advocated. In São Paulo state, the advancement of people of color was most prominent in the industrial sector, where the politics favoring “national” workers after 1930 allowed pretos and pardos to enter the labor force in numbers that approached their representation in the broader population. The fact that most factory jobs were concentrated in the city of São Paulo made the entrance of pretos and pardos into the industrial proletariat particularly visible there, despite their relatively low numbers in the city's overall population (9%, as opposed to 12% statewide in the 1940 census).¹⁵ By 1940 pretos and pardos in São Paulo state also approached parity with their white counterparts in public sector jobs—the same modest subset of public employment (janitors, office messengers, street sweepers) that had sustained the city's precarious black middle class in the early years of the twentieth century and which subsequently formed the basis of the patronage networks of the Vargas regime.¹⁶

Yet people of color in São Paulo still had a long way to go. In 1940 pretos and pardos in that state continued to lag behind whites in literacy rates and remained sharply underrepresented among high school and college graduates.¹⁷ Despite breaking into the industrial working class, pretos and pardos had a particularly hard time getting white-collar jobs.¹⁸ Furthermore, even by the transition to democracy in 1945, key areas of Paulistano and Brazilian society—notably the military, civil service, diplomatic service, and many restaurants and public spaces—remained in a state of de facto segregation.

In the city of Rio de Janeiro, pretos and pardos (who made up 11% and 17% of the population in 1940, respectively) in many respects fared even better under Vargas than their counterparts elsewhere in the country. Gains were most striking in the area of education, thanks to the expansion of public schools in the Federal District under Vargas. Literacy rates for pretos and pardos in the city of Rio de Janeiro in 1940 far outpaced the national average for people of color, and although they were lower than the rates for whites in Rio, they actually exceeded rates for whites in some areas of the nation.¹⁹ In terms of employment, pretos and pardos also benefited somewhat from Rio's expansion as an administrative, commercial, and industrial center over the course of the Vargas years. Most people of color who found jobs did so in agriculture, industry, manual trades, and the service economy, and indeed they were overrepresented in these areas. As in São Paulo, public sector jobs remained an important area of upward mobility for some people of color in Rio, with the difference that in Rio, according to midcentury accounts, employers distinguished clearly between pardos and pretos and consistently privileged the former for many public service posts.²⁰ Yet people of color remained greatly underrepresented in areas like commerce and the liberal professions, given their overall numbers in the city's population.²¹

On the one hand, the relative mobility of pardos in Rio suggests that in that city, the divide between whites and nonwhites was less sharp than in São Paulo, where by midcentury pardos generally fared no better than pretos in terms of employment. On the other hand, many employers’ apparent predilection for lighter-skinned pardos over pretos suggests the existence of a significant color prejudice in Rio (if not a racial one, as in São Paulo). Indeed, despite the visible upward mobility of some sectors of Rio's population of color, the city was becoming highly segregated by space, color, and class by midcentury. In the first decade of the century, as we saw in chapter 2, the reforms of Mayor Francisco Pereira Passos had begun to beautify Rio's downtown spaces and remove its poor and dark citizens to the shanties and suburbs. Since then, the city's well-to-do citizens had relocated to the elegant beachside neighborhoods (like Flamengo, Botafogo, Copacabana, and Ipanema) south of the center city, while the poor were forced to places distant—horizontally or vertically—from the center and the wealthy South Zone. Some of Rio's poor and working-class people settled the areas north and west of the center city, giving rise to large industrial suburbs, while others continued to build precarious shanties on the slopes of the city's hills, or morros. By the postwar period, Rio de Janeiro was a largely segregated city, with a nonwhite, poor majority—swollen by the influx of hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the Northeast—inhabiting either the morros or the North Zone's subúrbios. This segregation was neither legalized nor watertight; many morros, for instance, were located on the edges of Rio's wealthy neighborhoods, and preto and pardo service workers from an array of neighborhoods entered Rio's center city and South Zone on a daily basis. Nonetheless, as one contemporary researcher noted, social distance along the intersecting lines of race and class mapped clearly onto spatial distance in midcentury Rio de Janeiro.²² For all of its growing fame as the cradle of a mestiço national culture and an emblem of Brazil's interracial harmony, postwar Rio de Janeiro embodied perhaps better than any other Brazilian city the overlapping race and class inequalities that divided Brazilian society.

The growing ranks of educated people of color and the reopening of civil society in Rio de Janeiro gave rise to several explicitly race-based organizations and publications in that city, where few had existed during the First Republic and where, by all accounts, the Frente Negra of the 1930s had few members.²³ In 1949 Joviano Severino de Melo and José Bernardo da Silva founded a chapter of the União dos Homens de Cor (UHC, or Union of Men of Color) in Rio de Janeiro. Though part of a broader organization that emerged from the state of Rio Grande do Sul and spread to at least ten other states after 1943, Rio's chapter of the UHC appears to have been somewhat idiosyncratic in its goals and outlook. The UHC's national statutes highlighted, above all, the objective of “elevating the economic and intellectual level of people of color across the national territory, preparing them to enter the social and administrative life of the country, in all of its activities.” Across several Brazilian states, the UHC sought to attract polished, presentable black professionals who would uphold the group's image as a promoter of liberal, middle-class values of racial uplift.²⁴ This perspective, so reminiscent of the politics of most of São Paulo's black thinkers since the early decades of the century, is not surprising given that the organization was created in Rio Grande do Sul, a state where the separation between a tiny black minority and a white immigrant majority was even sharper than in São Paulo. Yet in Rio de Janeiro, the UHC appears to have been more concerned with reaching out to poor Brazilians of color than with promoting middle-class values among its own membership. Indeed, on several occasions, its leaders expressed discomfort with organizations that appeared to work exclusively for the benefit of an elite of color and that placed race at the forefront of their activism at the expense of class.²⁵ Instead, leaders of Rio's UHC modeled their group after charitable organizations, working to assist the poor through concrete means like the distribution of food, clothing, and medicine. They also worked as a pressure group, staging protests and writing public letters denouncing instances of racial discrimination.²⁶

In large part, the particular character of the Rio chapter of the UHC reflected the influence of José Bernardo da Silva, its cofounder and intellectual “mentor.” Silva was a former stevedore who learned to read and write in his late twenties and subsequently became a professional journalist. Despite his education and upward mobility, Silva referred to himself in several articles as an “operário,” or laborer, telegraphing his continued identification with his lower-class background and his sympathies for class-based politics.²⁷ Silva was also the leader of a small spiritualist Christian center, “Jesus no Himalaya,” with which the UHC collaborated. The activities of the UHC and the Christian center, chronicled in the small newspaper called Himalaya: órgão de justiça social cristã (Himalaya: Organ of Christian Social Justice), also edited by Silva, suggest that the UHC hoped to bring about “the political, cultural, economic, and moral recovery, within Brazilian society, of the marginalized of our ethnic group” within a broader social-Christian framework.²⁸ True to this ideal, the UHC's leaders did not publish a separate newspaper dedicated solely to racial issues. Instead, they published a regular column titled “A voz do negro” (its name and illustration sharply reminiscent of the Frente Negra's A Voz da Raça) alongside Himalaya's broader coverage of the Christian center's events.²⁹ It may have been the leadership's admiration for the Frente Negra, one of the few racial organizations to reach out beyond a small middle-class elite, that led José Bernardo da Silva, along with Isaltino Veiga dos Santos and a handful of other black men, to attempt (unsuccessfully) to revive the Frente in Rio de Janeiro in 1954.³⁰

Idiosyncratic as Silva's influences might seem, however, the UHC in many ways reflects the specific patterns of black activism that characterized Rio at midcentury and which, as in earlier years, distinguished its black politics from those of São Paulo. After World War II, as in previous decades, most black organizations in São Paulo adopted a strong notion of negro racialism, reflecting both the stark division that prevailed in that city between a white majority and a black minority, and the scant spaces that both white racism and black activism left for intermediate color identifications. Light-skinned pardos, like veteran newspaperman José Correia Leite, were welcome in Paulistano black organizations as long as they were willing to assume their identities as negros and to give up potentially divisive claims to a distinct status based on lighter skin. Yet founders of Rio's chapter of the UHC stressed, on several occasions, that their members included “pretos, pardos, and antiracist whites, . . . believers in the dignity of human beings of any color, nationality, political or religious creed, class, level of culture, or social condition.”³¹ Their express inclusion of both pretos and pardos underscored precisely those distinctions of color that, contemporary census categories and patterns of discrimination suggest, were meaningful to many whites and nonwhites in Rio de Janeiro at midcentury. The prime role the UHC reserved for “antiracist whites,” moreover, also fits with longer-standing patterns of black mobilization in that city, suggesting that in the mid-1940s (as in the 1920s), Rio may have presented greater opportunities for interracial sociability, and therefore for cross-race and cross-class alliances, than São Paulo. Black writers in São Paulo had at times relied on the words of antiracist whites, but they almost never counted these people as members of their negro political associations. Yet in Rio, as we have seen, there was a historically strong connection between racial and class-based activism, notably among black port workers like José Bernardo da Silva, who in their unions or political demonstrations often worked alongside whites. And in the area of popular culture and performance, for which Rio came to national prominence in the first half of the twentieth century, the ongoing visibility of dark-skinned musicians and entertainers in a range of often integrated popular settings (such as carnival, samba schools, small clubs and bars, upscale and “dive” theaters, or movie parlors, to name a few), as well as the close (if often extremely unequal) interactions between artists of color and whites in Rio's music industry and professional organizations, provide perhaps the best examples of the sorts of avenues for cross-racial contacts Rio offered at midcentury.³²

In part because of the possibilities of such interracial alliances in Rio, and because of the historically strong link in that city between racial and class-based activism, very few organizations in the 1920s or in the postwar period framed their work explicitly and exclusively in terms of racial concerns. To be sure, in its express concern with the fate of people of color, going so far as to adopt the racial term negro in its publications, Rio's UHC betrays its origins as an import from the immigrant-heavy Brazilian South, where “blackness” emerged as a more sharply defined sociopolitical identity. No doubt, UHC leaders in Rio found this treatment of the racial question appealing, and at times they experimented with placing race in the foreground of their public identities. Yet in its inclusion of white members, its close ties to the Christian center, its antielitist commitment to members “of any level of culture or social condition,” and above all, its leaders’ insistence that the problems of poverty and racism had to be tackled together, the UHC differed from most black organizations in São Paulo. It reflected instead the sorts of concerns and strategies that had historically driven racial activism in Rio and that continued to shape newer organizations in the postwar period.³³

The personal and political trajectories of Abdias do Nascimento, who would become a leading figure of Brazilian black thought and politics, further illustrate the distinctive contours of black activism in midcentury São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.³⁴ Though Nascimento undertook the work that would make him famous in the Rio de Janeiro of the mid-1940s, his views on race and racial activism, and his own identity as a black intellectual, were shaped by his back-and-forth travels between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo during his formative years. Nascimento was born in 1914 in Franca, a small town in São Paulo's coffee-growing interior, the grandson of freed slaves. His father was a shoemaker, and his mother worked variously as a cook, a seamstress, and a wet-nurse to the children of Franca's coffee planters. Like São Paulo's José Correia Leite, Nascimento later traced his consciousness of race and racism—above all, his sense of himself as a negro—to the experience of growing up in a community heavily populated with Italian immigrant workers, who called him demeaning nicknames like “tição” or charcoal. (Unlike Leite, however, Nascimento also recalled the middle- and upper-class Brazilians of his rural town voicing similar insults.)

As a teenager, Abdias do Nascimento—a young army recruit—moved to São Paulo City, where he joined the Frente Negra. He channeled his anger and youthful energy into what the Frente called “isolated actions,” like starting fistfights in barbershops or movie theaters that barred people of color, and was arrested on several occasions. Like other members of São Paulo's Frente Negra, Nascimento soon found himself drawn to Integralism, Brazil's quasi-fascistic nationalist movement, perhaps for its emphasis on martial masculinity (though Nascimento later recalled his admiration for its “anti-imperialist and antibourgeois position”). When he moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1936, he, like several other politically active men of color in that city, joined the local chapter of the national Integralist movement rather than the Frente Negra (which, Nascimento recalled, was nearly nonexistent in Rio, perhaps for the reasons suggested above). Yet the Integralists soon disappointed him for their racist attitudes, and Nascimento began to search for new outlets for his racial politics within the confines of the Estado Novo. He found them in part through ongoing contacts with friends and activists from his São Paulo days. In 1938 Nascimento collaborated with friends in Campinas (the city in São Paulo state whose sharp color line had given rise to the black newspaper O Getulino in the 1920s) to stage an academic congress aimed at exposing racial discrimination there. In 1943 Nascimento, by then based in Rio, joined forces with several Paulista black activists to bring to Vargas's attention a local police chief's denial of black people's right to frequent the Rua Direita, a favorite gathering place in downtown São Paulo.³⁵ This form of protest, with its direct appeal to the executive, seems drawn almost directly from the playbook of São Paulo's Frente Negra.

According to his own accounts, Nascimento's outlook on black activism changed when he took a trip to Argentina in 1943. In Buenos Aires, he witnessed the work of the independent Teatro del Pueblo, which inspired him to think about theater as a tool for political education. Nascimento recalled that the Teatro, in the tradition of anarchist theater, encouraged the audience to participate in and comment on all aspects of the performance (text, direction, acting), thereby serving as a school for el pueblo. On his return to Brazil, Nascimento approached black activists and intellectuals in São Paulo with the idea of a theater group designed to raise public consciousness about racial oppression, but he found little support there (despite the fact that earlier black associations in that city, like the Elite and Kosmos clubs, had featured theater groups as part of their activities). He turned instead to friends and acquaintances from Rio de Janeiro—people like Sebastião Rodrigues Alves, a man of color who had also been an Integralist, and an array of other young professionals, artists, and workers of color, both men and women, who enthusiastically backed him.

Years later, Nascimento suggested that Rio's different traditions of black activism made that city fertile ground for his black theater idea. In São Paulo, he noted, black thinkers and activists staged explicit protests against racism and “confronted oppression with a warlike attitude,” invoking political principles of “justice and the rights of citizenship.” But many of their counterparts in Rio de Janeiro saw cultural elements, particularly in Rio's African-inflected popular culture, like samba or Candomblé, as sites for activism.³⁶ In the years that followed, Nascimento would skillfully combine his experiences with the explicitly negro, independent political activism of São Paulo, and Rio's more fluid integration of Afro-Carioca cultural expression into mainstream spaces and institutions, to create one of the most prominent black Brazilian organizations of the twentieth century.

In October 1944, as an Allied victory in Europe drew nearer and pressure mounted on the Vargas regime to open new spaces for public debate, Abdias do Nascimento and his colleagues founded the Teatro Experimental do Negro (TEN, or Black Experimental Theater) in Rio de Janeiro. Their immediate goal was to cast black actors, both professionals and amateurs, in more dignified roles than the servants, criminals, or prostitutes they had until then embodied in the racially exclusive world of Brazilian theater. The troupe's first show, a performance of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, débuted at Rio's elite Teatro Municipal on 8 May 1945 (coincidentally, the day the Allies accepted Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender). The TEN then expanded its activities to include popular theater, workshops, and academic events to educate blacks and whites about race and racism in Brazil. TEN members also offered adult literacy courses and taught classes on the history of Africa and Africans in the Americas (which, together, reportedly drew up to six hundred students), and helped coordinate national-level black activism. The TEN and its newspaper Quilombo (a term referring to Brazil's runaway slave communities), edited in Rio from 1948 to 1950 and reaching an estimated circulation of two to three thousand copies per issue, would dominate the black intellectual scene in that city well into the 1950s.³⁷

As black thinkers and activists in Rio and São Paulo began to revive old institutions and build new ones, they also sought to give black politics a more “national” character by stimulating connections between their two cities. In November 1945, members of Rio's TEN, along with members of organizations from several other cities, traveled to São Paulo for the first Convenção Nacional do Negro Brasileiro, or Black Brazilian National Convention. Convention leaders called on black Brazilians “regardless of sex, age, political or religious belief, to close ranks,” and emphasized the importance of “unifying and coordinating our efforts.”³⁸ A month later, the magazine Senzala (Slave Quarters) began publication out of São Paulo. Though Senzala would prove short-lived, its long and varied list of contributors illustrates an emerging spirit of collaboration that was not only about bridging regional distances between vibrant sites of race-based activism (contributors hailed from São Paulo, Rio, and Campinas) but also about healing old political wounds. Along with the names of a newer generation of activists (like Abdias do Nascimento of Rio's TEN, Geraldo Campos de Oliveira of São Paulo's Novo Horizonte, and Luiz Lobato of São Paulo's Marxist Clube Jabaquara), the list boasted an array of veterans from the black politics of the 1920s and 1930s. These included Jayme de Aguiar, José Correia Leite, and Lino Guedes (all formerly of Clarim), as well as former frentenegrinos Aristides Barbosa, Francisco Lucrécio, and Isaltino Veiga dos Santos (cofounder, along with his brother Arlindo, of the Frente Negra, and contributor to A Voz da Raça). Though far from “national” in a geographical sense, this loose alliance among southeastern black thinkers (itself partly the result of the greater integration of Brazil's core regions after the Vargas regime) helped give black politics higher visibility on a national stage in the years that followed.

Abdias do Nascimento, 1955. Coleção Fotos Correio da Manhã, PH/FOT 35917. Acervo do Arquivo Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

“To use those freedoms”

Self-appointed leaders of Rio and São Paulo's new black organizations understood the democratic opening as a challenge and an opportunity to rectify the inequalities affecting people of color in their cities. If, as Quilombo’s Alberto Guerreiro Ramos claimed, “Brazilian society grants men of color practically all freedoms,” the task then awaiting black thinkers and activists was “training [Brazilians of color], through culture and education, to use those freedoms.”³⁹ One of the principal freedoms black thinkers wished to “train” Brazilians of color to use was the right to vote in an electoral democracy. The newspapers emerging after 1945 expressed much greater interest in electoral politics than did their earlier counterparts, with frequent articles on parties, candidates, and platforms.⁴⁰ The papers also began printing paid political advertisements, mostly for black candidates running for local office as part of national party tickets. Several of these candidates were editors of black newspapers, like Geraldo Campos de Oliveira of Senzala and José Correia Leite of Alvorada (running for office in São Paulo) and Abdias do Nascimento of Quilombo and José Bernardo da Silva of Himalaya (in Rio). Though none of them were elected, these men's candidacy for local office as members of national mainstream parties signals the gradual emergence of new channels for institutional participation by black Brazilians in this period, especially toward the end of the 1940s.

In some instances, black writers used their newspapers to endorse a particular candidate, such as when Mundo Novo’s director, Armando de Castro, backed Geraldo Campos de Oliveira in his bid for the state legislature of São Paulo in 1950.⁴¹ More generally, however, writers limited their advocacy to nonpartisan articles educating readers on the importance of black participation—as both voters and candidates—in the democratic process. “The man of color in Brazil must understand his position at this moment,” wrote Abdias do Nascimento in Rio's Quilombo. “The enormous contingent of black voters must not let itself be led to the urns like lambs with no consciousness of their electoral power.” Nascimento called the vote “a weapon” that “we must use . . . to elect those who truly feel [our] problems and wish to solve them as far as possible,” and proclaimed the selection of black candidates to be “a decisive ‘test’” of party leaders’ commitment to racial equality.⁴²

Yet Brazil's postwar democracy, though a remarkable achievement in many ways, had distinct limitations. Though the electorate had expanded significantly under Vargas, the 1946 Constitution still denied the vote to illiterates (approximately 60% of the adult population), military enlisted men, and noncommissioned officers, thus disenfranchising well over half of Brazil's population.⁴³ Only 22 percent of pardo Brazilians and 20 percent of preto Brazilians could read in 1950, disproportionately excluding them from voting rights.⁴⁴ In Rio, where literacy rates for people of color were considerably higher, the situation was somewhat better. Perhaps this explains why Nascimento described an “enormous contingent of black voters” waiting to unleash their electoral power in that city. But nationwide, only 16 percent of the total population registered to vote in the 1945 elections (a number that would increase, though not enormously, over the next two decades), suggesting that few Brazilians saw voting as a crucial (or even possible) avenue for playing a role in Brazilian politics in this period.⁴⁵

While their leaders sometimes ran for political office or urged people of color to vote, black organizations in both cities in this period generally did not seek to mobilize poor and working people of color, especially when compared to the more assertive efforts of unions and labor-based parties.⁴⁶ In ways reminiscent of the earlier social clubs in São Paulo, Rio's TEN, for instance, kept a relatively small, select membership and focused primarily on elite cultural activities like theater or beauty pageants for women of color. The motto on the masthead of Novo Horizonte for much of this period captures these aspiring middle-class values of education and culture: “To be a good black man, be cultured—the future of our race demands it.”⁴⁷ A few organizations, like Rio's União dos Homens de Cor and São Paulo's Associação do Negro Brasileiro and Associação José do Patrocínio, reached out to poor and working-class people with concrete programs of social assistance and advocacy. On several occasions, as mentioned above, leaders of the UHC even expressed disdain for what they saw as elitist middle-class negro groups. They were especially critical of the TEN, with its predilection for theater or academic congresses. Nevertheless, even the UHC was not designed to be a mass organization; rather it was conceived as a small group of people dedicated to helping the poor. The educated leaders of the UHC, like their counterparts in the TEN, were selective in recruiting members, and the UHC therefore remained relatively small.⁴⁸

For these reasons, scholars have largely characterized postwar black organizations in Rio and São Paulo as elitist, apolitical, or weak in comparison to the Frente Negra of earlier years or, more pointedly, to the Movimento Negro of later years.⁴⁹ And in several ways, leaders of postwar black organizations and newspapers fit this description. Viewing themselves as members of a select intelligentsia of color who believed in an ideology of uplift, or even as Christian social workers, southeastern black thinkers in this period generally acquiesced to their society's limited democracy and only challenged it in ways that would ensure greater education and middle-class values among black Brazilians. Black thinkers and activists did not, for example, challenge the literacy requirement that kept so many Brazilians (of all colors) from voting. Instead, they called for improved black education and in some cases took charge of literacy campaigns. Education, of course, contributed to equality in and of itself, and it had the secondary effect of producing more potentially active citizens of color.⁵⁰ Nor did black thinkers in this period attempt to become power brokers in a political machine, leveraging influence for their group by promising to deliver black votes to a particular party. Instead, they tended to see themselves as intermediaries responsible, on the one hand, for presenting a variety of political options to their (very limited) readership and, on the other, for pressuring candidates of all major parties to address social and economic issues affecting black Brazilians.⁵¹

Yet the story is more complicated than portrayals of elitism and weakness would suggest. Democracy had a range of meanings for midcentury black thinkers. Perhaps most central was the opportunity the democratic opening provided to present themselves (and the broader population of black and brown Brazilians they hoped to represent) as rational and balanced political actors, capable of participating productively in a democratic system. In many ways, this goal took precedence over, and even preempted, any concrete attempt to organize potential legions of black voters. On principle, writers in the postwar black press rarely endorsed specific parties or candidates, arguing that such partisanship could taint the virtue of their activism on behalf of all people of color. Abdias do Nascimento best phrased the potential payoff of this strategy in an article for Quilombo: “We have nothing to do with parties, neither the so-called democratic ones, nor those of the Right or Left, which have always engaged in the electoral exploitation of blacks. . . . Even less do we advocate a black politics; what we do express is our will to be Brazilians, with the same responsibilities as other Brazilians.”⁵² As a private citizen, Nascimento leaned toward the Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro (PTB, or Brazilian Labor Party), a primarily urban party loyal to Vargas, which in November 1946 created a Black Council (Diretório Negro) dedicated to discussing racial issues and selecting candidates linked to Rio's black community.⁵³ In his public writings, however, Nascimento sought to preserve the appearance of political independence for blacks and the re-emerging black movement as a whole. Several black newspapers at this time, most notably José Correia Leite's Alvorada, took a similarly neutral stance toward local and national politics, while extolling the virtues of political and civic participation writ large. For Leite, at least, this choice likely reflected a desire to retreat from the extreme partisan divisions of the previous decade.⁵⁴ Only a few papers, like Aristides Barbosa's Novo Horizonte, publicly involved themselves in party politics (at one point, Novo Horizonte endorsed the governorship of São Paulo's Adhemar de Barros [1947–51]). Political scientist Michael Mitchell argues that though this political affiliation compromised Novo Horizonte in the eyes of some readers, it helped ensure the paper's existence for more than fifteen years.⁵⁵ By contrast, the editors of Alvorada, though widely respected for refusing any political affiliation and attempting to make their paper available for free, were forced to cease publication after three years.⁵⁶ Seen as a principle for which black writers were willing to sacrifice even the eventual viability of their publications, then, the choice to remain outside of party politics appears not as passive or apolitical but as a shrewd, if cautious, tactic aimed at showcasing blacks as full and politically responsible citizens.

To midcentury black thinkers, then, democracy was not just about electoral or participatory politics. It was also a discourse and a set of performances through which they attempted to proclaim pretos’ and pardos’ political competence and full belonging as Brazilian citizens. Black thinkers in the 1940s and 1950s used the idea of democracy in the ways that an earlier generation of activists had used the idea of fraternity—as an acceptable idiom, a shared symbol, through which to make their claims to full citizenship. And, like the republican ideal of fraternity in an earlier period, the trope of political democracy functioned both to celebrate a national ideal and to make demands on it. Most of the time, black thinkers’ rhetoric was just that—passionate writing that reflected their relatively limited political outlets and their particular outlook as an elite of color. But at times, the rhetoric of democracy—combined with pressure applied through the democratic public sphere—proved a powerful resource in the struggle for equality.

A Second Abolition

In the budding black publications of postwar São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, writers greeted the return of democracy with high spirits and equally high expectations. In the first issue of Alvorada (28 September 1945), José Correia Leite ambitiously addressed his potential readers as “negros of Brazil,” and located Brazil's democratic reawakening in the context of a global transformation: “In front of us, there unfolds the dawn of a new era. People everywhere advocate for the reconstruction of a better world.”⁵⁷ In another article, Alvorada’s editors called the election of 1945 “perhaps the most significant fact of our history as a Republic” and congratulated Brazilians on “our country's return to a democratic regime.”⁵⁸ Many writers in these newspapers scripted negros into what Senzala’s Luiz Lobato called “the great starring role of democracy” in Brazil.⁵⁹Alvorada, taking a grand historical view, reminded its readers that blacks had been the “advance guard” of freedom in Brazil, from their role in defending the nation against the Dutch in the seventeenth century to their recent participation in the Revolution of 1930 against “dominant oligarchies.”⁶⁰

Implicit in this celebration of blacks’ position at the forefront of Brazil's steady march toward democracy was the pointed demand that the new democratic regime repay its obligations by making racial equality a reality. Black writers frequently made racial equality the test of Brazil's much vaunted political democracy, and declared it still incomplete. “It is with indescribable grief that we hear our orators proclaim from the heights the word ‘Democracy,’” wrote Waldemar Machado of Novo Horizonte. “‘We are in a full democracy,’ they say constantly. What democracy? . . . Until we give better opportunities to the [black] descendants of Henrique Dias . . . it is inadmissible to have it proclaimed in public that we live in a full democracy. Being black in Brazil means living amid severe limitations.”⁶¹ Indeed, because the return of democracy at midcentury was generally understood as a dramatic, if still unfinished, washing away of the evils of previous regimes, it provided a perfect juncture to express openly the persistence of racism in Brazil and demand action from the new regime, while still joining patriotically in the chorus of national political rhetoric. Rio's UHC, for instance, declared in its membership pledge that “despite the fact the Imperial Law 3,353 of 13 May 1888 [which abolished slavery] assured equality and rights to all Brazilians, without distinction of color, the black family is placed at the margin of politics and of the high administration of the nation; therefore, it remains in a state of moral and civic slavery.”⁶² The masthead of Alvorada in November 1945 called abolition a “sentimental lie.”⁶³ And Leite warned readers that abolition had been an “incomplete” process, that blacks should “not relax in the belief that they are already fully free.”⁶⁴ The diagnosis of an “incomplete emancipation” that dogged all people of color, issued by the editors of O Baluarte as early as 1903, thus continued to resonate among black writers at midcentury.

Where the Republic and the Estado Novo had failed, however, postwar black writers dared to hope that the Second Republic, helped by the prevailing winds of international democracy, might succeed. Contributors to each of the most important new black papers, like Alvorada, Novo Horizonte, and Quilombo, saw in Brazil's redemocratization a long-awaited “Second Abolition” that would finally fulfill the promises of equality and inclusion.⁶⁵ In 1947 Leite explained that just as abolition had been a “door that opened in front of a race that was enslaved and full of hope,” so did democracy in his own time carry the promise and the burden of abolishing the slavery of prejudice, “help[ing] the black Brazilian to reach economic, cultural, and social stability in the heart of our national community.”⁶⁶ Writers like Leite turned the idea that democracy would bring what he called “true emancipation” into a call for black people to take action and make use of the prevailing political opening. Black political participation was a crucial component of a well-functioning political democracy, which “can only be made strong when an organized population conscientiously takes on its duties of cooperation.”⁶⁷

If the race-based organizations of the postwar period were unable, for various reasons, to mobilize a broader population of color toward greater political participation, they nonetheless found ways to use the principles and channels of democracy in the service of their struggle. In particular, the language of rights, and the principle of the rule of law, gave black thinkers in this period new traction with which to demand racial equality. In the opening editorial of the first issue of the TEN's Quilombo (1948), Abdias do Nascimento argued: “It is a transparent historical truth that the black man won his liberty not through the philanthropy or kindness of whites, but by his own struggle and by the unsustainability of the slave system. . . . The black man rejects humiliating pity and philanthropy, and fights for his right to Rights [direito ao Direito],” or, in the broader sense of the term direito in Portuguese, the right to the law.⁶⁸ For Nascimento, black Brazilians’ right to be equally protected by the laws of their country, and to participate equally in the democracy that gave these laws meaning, was the ultimate test of the new political system. To Nascimento, moreover, demanding full citizenship in this language of legal rights marked the distinction between robust, active claims to black belonging based on a history of civic participation and anemic, passive definitions of black citizenship, which depended on the pity and patronage of whites. In principle, this was not a new aspiration. Most black thinkers in the 1920s and 1930s had also sought to frame their claims to citizenship in an active voice, rejecting the “humiliating pity and philanthropy” of whites in favor of narratives that highlighted black economic, military, and cultural contributions to the nation. Yet claims framed through the newly vigorous language of democracy and rights made it easier for black activists at midcentury to demand equality on their own merits than the idioms available to black thinkers of earlier generations. The language of rights, with its claims to universal authority, revealed to many midcentury black thinkers the extent to which earlier strategies, based on appeals to the fraternal sentiments of whites, or to the nativist sentiments of elites in a paternalistic and authoritarian regime, had depended at least in part on a logic of concession.

Nascimento, however, clarified that having a “right to Rights” or a “right to the Law” did not just mean giving blacks “theoretical and codified rights.” After all, he noted, the notably racist Republic had already “theoretically” given blacks (as Brazilian citizens) equality under the law; what was still missing was “the active exercise of these rights.”⁶⁹ For Nascimento, as for other black thinkers of his time, the democratic Second Republic had the obligation to finally close the gap between theory and practice, between what black sociologist Alberto Guerreiro Ramos called “the legal black [o negro legal]” and “the real black [o negro real].”⁷⁰ As soon as they came together at the Black National Convention in São Paulo in November 1945, Paulistano and Carioca activists moved toward making these “theoretical” rights to equality more explicit in Brazil's Constitution, so that they might become realities in the lives of black and brown Brazilians. During the convention, activists wrote a “Manifesto to the Brazilian Nation” detailing a set of demands to be presented to the Constituent Assembly for inclusion in the Second Republic's Constitution. Among these demands, clearly framed in the language of democracy and law, the manifesto's writers included “that race and color prejudice be made a matter of law, as a crime against the fatherland [crime de lesa-pátria],” and “that any crime practiced in the above context be made a matter of penal law, applying to private businesses as well as to civic groups and other public and private institutions.” By “formulat[ing] and demand[ing] rights that, though granted by [abolition], were not concretely implemented,” convention delegates concluded, they would be working “so that the ideal of Abolition can become a reality in all of its terms, today and in the future.”⁷¹

Like the ANB's “Manifesto in Defense of Democracy,” issued only a few months earlier, the convention's “Manifesto” shows how significantly activists’ view of the law had changed since the 1920s. Then, black thinkers in both Rio and São Paulo had fought to defend the absence of legal discrimination in the nation's codes, a relatively recent gain, from proposed legislation that threatened to reinscribe racism into the law. At a time when the enactment of “theoretical” provisions of equality rested more on interpersonal goodwill than on firm institutional foundations, black thinkers had invoked fraternal sentiments to condemn racial discrimination. By the mid-1940s, however, in a context of national and global transformations that strengthened the real and rhetorical power of institutional democracy, black thinkers changed strategies. No longer content with the “theoretical” and passive absence of racial strictures in earlier constitutions, nor with the power of sentiment and personalistic ties to prevent unjust treatment, black thinkers demanded an explicit legal enforcement of racial equality, along with active state sanctions against private citizens who practiced race prejudice, and affirmative interventions in the area of social rights for Brazilians of color. They newly hoped that the law might prevail where fraternal or nationalist sentiment had not.

“Equal before the law . . . without distinction of race or color”

Like their counterparts in earlier decades, the thinkers and activists responsible for the reinvigoration of black politics after 1945 were talented and ambitious, and enjoyed respect and visibility in their immediate social circles. Yet they themselves were not members of a political or intellectual elite. As in an earlier period, gaining access to a broader public sphere, and building networks of support among more influential Brazilians, was crucial to the activism of the postwar years.⁷² Expanded access to the mainstream press, for instance, gave participants in the Black National Convention of 1945 the opportunity to make their demands heard on the national stage, and to build alliances with progressive politicians. In São Paulo, members of black organizations arranged for the convention's “Manifesto to the Brazilian Nation” to appear in their city's Folha da Noite on 11 November 1945. In Rio de Janeiro, Abdias do Nascimento, who wrote a weekly column for the Diário Trabalhista (a prolabor newspaper with close ties to the PTB) on the “Problems and aspirations of black Brazilians,” explained the substance of the demands of the “Manifesto” in the issue of 15 January 1946.⁷³ That Nascimento, a black thinker and activist, could write about racial issues in his own words in a mainstream newspaper suggests how much had changed since the 1920s, when black supporters of the Mãe Preta monument in Rio had appeared in the mainstream press only through short quotations or distorted paraphrases. That the “Manifesto” of 1945 and its demands were read and taken up by representatives of Brazil's populist and labor parties, moreover, reveals the openings that the democratic process newly afforded black claims at a time when these parties attempted to appeal to as wide a sector of the Brazilian population as possible.

In particular, the PTB, with its Black Council and its ties to Vargas, sought to profile itself as the party most receptive to the concerns of black Brazilians. Following the appearance of the “Manifesto” in the press, Congressman Manoel Benício Fontenelle, a PTB deputy from the Federal District (the city of Rio), took the document and its demand for an explicit antidiscrimination clause to the Constituent Assembly. He proposed amending article 159 of the draft Constitution, which read “All Brazilians are equal before the law,” by adding the phrase “without distinction of race or color.” Echoing the long-standing claims of black activists themselves, Fontenelle and his cosigners contended that the means by which slavery had been abolished in Brazil had placed African descendants in a position of “social inferiority.” And like contemporary black writers, proponents of the amendment boldly maintained that “racial prejudice in Brazil is a sad reality,” citing discrimination in the navy, army, and air force, as well as in commerce, theater, banking, schools, and public service. “This [amendment],” its authors concluded, “is the only path toward definitively extinguishing color prejudice, [by] integrating the noble and virile black race into its legitimate fatherland—Brazil.”⁷⁴

Though Fontenelle authored the amendment, it was Senator Hamilton Nogueira, a white representative from the Federal District for the conservative UDN, who became its most outspoken and visible defender.⁷⁵ In the tradition of the congressmen who argued against racial restrictions on immigration in the 1920s, Nogueira, in impassioned speeches condemning antiblack discrimination, anti-Semitism, or proposed bans on Japanese immigration, spoke out frequently against racism as a delegate to the Constituent Assembly.⁷⁶ Though Nogueira's particular antiracist stance, and his intense public commitment to it, was by no means representative of his party as a whole, it did resonate with important strands of antiracism in Brazilian conservative thought—particularly, the views of Gilberto Freyre, another UDN representative. Like Freyre, Nogueira saw explicit racial discrimination as anathema to the traditional values and fraternal sentiments of a Catholic, mestiço Brazil. Yet whatever the origins of Nogueira's broad-based rejection of racism, his chosen language closely mirrored that of contemporary black thinkers in its concern with framing racism as an assault on democracy and an offense against modern international standards of humanitarianism. Also like black thinkers, on several occasions (as when he derailed a complacent, hagiographic discussion of Brazilian abolition on its anniversary in May 1946), Nogueira insisted that antiblack racism was still alive and well in Brazil, in practice if not in the law. In calling for an antidiscrimination clause in the constitution, Nogueira's language amplified that of black activists’ 1945 “Manifesto.” Where they had called racism a “crime against the fatherland [crime de lesa-pátria],” Nogueira condemned racism as “a crime against humanity [crime de lesa-humanidade].” For Nogueira, as for black thinkers in the mid-1940s, abolition was not yet a finished process, and the inclusion of an article in the Brazilian constitution spelling out “the equality of all races before the law” would be a test of the “humanist base” of Brazil's democracy, and of its ability to break with an exclusionary past.⁷⁷

The black newspapers of Rio and São Paulo followed Nogueira's activities closely, hailing him as “the Senator of the negros.”⁷⁸ They were disappointed when, in August 1946, a month before the constitution was promulgated, the Assembly voted down Nogueira and Fontenelle's amendment. The majority argued that the amendment was redundant, since the constitution already protected the equal rights of all citizens and therefore did not need to specify racial equality.⁷⁹ But a group of dissenting representatives, led by Fontenelle, signed a declaration registering their continued support of the amendment, “being convinced that it was of a profoundly democratic nature,” and proclaiming their intent to take the matter up in the future.⁸⁰

Despite the failure of this legislative project, activists continued to work, along with allies in Congress, to make sure instances of racial discrimination were heard and addressed. In February 1949, as Abdias do Nascimento and other TEN actors sought to enter Rio's elegant Hotel Glória to attend an actor's ball, a local policeman (apparently at the instigation of the hotel management) barred the group from entering. Abdias do Nascimento mounted a wide-ranging publicity campaign to bring this episode to light, tracking his progress through his publication, Quilombo. First, Nascimento published an open letter to Brazil's chief of police in several mainstream newspapers, denouncing the offending policeman's racist attitude as “incompatible with democracy.”⁸¹ After this, the news spread—Senator Nogueira used Nascimento's case in one of his speeches to the Senate as an example of ongoing discrimination and of the need for antiracist legislation; Representative Barreto Pinto (of the PTB) gave an extensive speech denouncing the event in the Chamber of Deputies; cultural associations appealed in the mainstream press; and in the United States the Pittsburgh Courier (a black newspaper whose editor, George Schuyler, had visited Brazil and established a close relationship with Nascimento) published an article on the incident.⁸² Perhaps most satisfying for Nascimento in his use of the public sphere to denounce racism was the fact that Edgard da Rocha Miranda, a São Paulo doctor who owned the hotel from which Nascimento was barred, wrote an indignant letter to President Dutra demanding that he take action against such abuses. Dutra's personal secretary responded to Rocha Miranda, assuring him that the policeman in question had been dismissed from his post. Quilombo reported on these events under the headline “Dutra against Racism,” which cleverly claimed Brazil's president as an ally.⁸³

Even more highly publicized than Nascimento's experience of racial discrimination were two cases that, as in the immigration debates of the 1920s, involved people of color from the United States. These incidents, however, publicly threw into question long-standing contrasts between a racially harmonious Brazil and a racist United States. In 1947 U.S. social scientist Irene Diggs, on a visit to Rio de Janeiro, had been refused entrance to the Hotel Serrador because of her skin color. And in 1950 another African American visitor, dancer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham, was barred from entering São Paulo's Hotel Esplanada for the same reason. Thanks to those women's fame and their vocal complaints, these incidents received widespread publicity, causing great embarrassment among Brazilian elites committed to maintaining their country's image of racial harmony. Diggs claimed that while prejudice in the United States was tending to disappear, she believed it was getting stronger in Brazil. And Dunham noted her “disenchantment” with Brazil, which far from being the racial paradise many advertised, was in fact the “Latin American country with the most hateful prejudice.”⁸⁴ In the mainstream press coverage of these events, a few interviewed black journalists, like São Paulo's Geraldo Campos de Oliveira, noted that such incidents confirmed the existence of racial prejudice in Brazil—an assertion, he strategically argued, made “not by us” black activists but by respected national authorities like Gilberto Freyre and Arthur Ramos, as well as a range of international scholars and observers.⁸⁵

These incidents struck a chord among black thinkers and in Brazilian public life more broadly, largely because of the power that the international context added to arguments against racism in the postwar years. Like Nogueira, black activists frequently sought to amplify their nationalist antiracist arguments by drawing on a new internationalist humanitarian language of rights, particularly in the wake of the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Drafted to express the world's horrified rejection of totalitarianism and genocide, the declaration emphasized equal rights for all human beings regardless of race. The document resonated with black activists in Rio and São Paulo, who republished segments of it in their newspapers, included it in their organizations’ statutes (like those of Rio's UHC), or otherwise made frequent reference to it in the course of their political claims and practices. A journalist for Quilombo, for instance, spoke of “our right—a right assured by the Constitution and by the eternal principles of human rights—to seek a place in the heart of the Brazilian collectivity.”⁸⁶ In addition to national traditions and laws, then, the language of human rights provided a powerful justification—interpreted as universal and timeless—for activists’ demands for racial equality and expanded rights.

But it was arguably the comparison with the United States that made the international context of democratization most useful to midcentury black thinkers seeking to expand their constitutional rights. “Fifty-eight years have passed [since abolition],” writer Aristides Negreiros of Alvorada proclaimed. “And what Liberty? What Democracy? It is a lying, shameful liberty, where the black Brazilian race must face all sorts of prejudices, in a country built by our own ancestors. . . . What democracy does not allow blacks to enter the diplomatic service?” Brazil was, he added in the most damning comparison imaginable, “a democracy just like that of the United States.”⁸⁷ This cautionary reference to the United States helped to specify the kind of democracy Brazil should be: a “racial” democracy in which racial equality was a fundamental ingredient. A racist democracy, Negreiros implied, was no democracy at all. Writers in the black press joined him in making this point through their frequent denunciations of racism in the self-proclaimed “land of liberty and democracy,” or, in one particular case, through an open letter to U.S. president Harry S. Truman pointing out the position of the United States as an international pariah in a “postwar world” in which “racial discrimination was an aberration.”⁸⁸ Singling out the United States as a place where democracy had failed to redress the problems of racism put black thinkers on the side of acceptable nationalist discourses that rested on the contrast between a racist United States and a racially harmonious Brazil. But it also allowed them to hold Brazil to a higher standard.

The international incidents sparked by the mistreatment of Diggs and Dunham reopened debate in the Brazilian Congress over legislation against racial discrimination, eventually resulting in the Afonso Arinos Law of 1951. The law provided a series of punishments for public and private establishments that refused service to people of color, including fines and up to a year in prison. Repeat offenders could lose their positions, and establishments could be shut down.⁸⁹ Among the key proponents of the law were Senator Hamilton Nogueira and Deputy Gilberto Freyre, both of whom had endorsed black activists’ calls for some form of antidiscrimination clause in the 1946 Constitution. Although the bad press that Brazil received internationally as a result of Diggs's and Dunham's denunciations was decisive in passing the Arinos Law, Nogueira also used the example of Nascimento's incident in his arguments.⁹⁰ And Afonso Arinos de Melo Franco, who authored the bill, explained that the incident that motivated him to action involved his chauffeur, who for being dark-skinned was refused service at an establishment in downtown São Paulo.⁹¹ In other words, discrimination against Brazilians of color, and not just against higher-profile black foreigners, came to light during this period as an offense demanding legal redress. During the debates, Freyre argued, in the language he was helping to develop, that failing to use the political system to punish such racist acts would “betray our duties as representatives of a nation that has made the ideal, if not always the practice, of a social and even ethnic democracy one of its reasons for existence and one of its conditions of development.”⁹²

Emphasizing the role of Diggs and Dunham in the passage of the Afonso Arinos Law, scholars have interpreted it as a rearguard, remedial move by conservative politicians eager to defend Brazil's international reputation as a racial democracy.⁹³ Yet what has gone relatively unnoticed in the law's history is the extent to which it was also the result of the efforts of Brazilian black activists to make political democracy a vehicle for racial equality in this period. Especially considering the limitations of voting as a mechanism for black activism, Nascimento and other leaders’ strategic use of the public sphere (as well as the sympathy of powerful political allies) should be considered an important part of the history of antidiscrimination legislation and a success more broadly of activists’ attempts to work within a limited kind of political democracy. Indeed, contemporary black thinkers saw the Afonso Arinos Law as a major step toward Brazil's “second abolition” and claimed it as their own.⁹⁴ Since then, enthusiasm for the Afonso Arinos has been eclipsed by the fact that the law went almost completely unenforced in the ensuing years.⁹⁵ For black activists in subsequent decades, the law would become a symbol of the failings of Brazil's racial democracy. But in the context of contemporary activists’ attempts to harness democracy to the project of racial equality, that law stood among their most important accomplishments, even if it did not transform Brazilian society as they hoped.

Democracia Racial

It was in the midst of the national and international enthusiasm for democracy at the end of World War II that the phrase democracia racial made its way into Brazilian public life. According to sociologist Antônio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães, despite the widespread scholarly and popular attribution of that term to Gilberto Freyre's 1933 Casa-grande e senzala, Freyre did not use democracia racial in his writings until at least the 1940s.⁹⁶ Even then, Freyre was but one of several leading social scientists who collectively helped usher that term and concept into the national public consciousness. Freyre was perhaps the first to use the political metaphor of democracy to describe harmonious relations among the nation's ethnic groups. In a series of lectures he gave abroad in the late 1930s and early 1940s, he called Brazil a “social and ethnic democracy” where democracy stood opposed not to aristocracy (the tyrant of his earlier works) but to totalitarianism, and where Brazil's ethnic syncretism stood opposed to the obsession with racial purity at the heart of Nazism and fascism. In 1941 anthropologist Arthur Ramos, a committed antiracist and a prodemocracy activist, spoke publicly of the need for democracy to be not just political but also, among other things, “racial.” And in a series of articles for the Diário de São Paulo in 1944, French scholar Roger Bastide described Brazil's “racial democracy” as an example and a balm for the rifts that totalitarianism had opened in Europe.⁹⁷

Over the next few years, Guimarães demonstrates, the idea that Brazil was a racial democracy became a widely held consensus among Brazilians of different backgrounds. The term's power, he argues, lay in its ability to mean different things to different people. To conservatives like Freyre, the term celebrated Brazilians’ near-complete achievement of racial equality, just as older discourses of Brazil's racial paradise had done at different times at least since the days of the Empire. In this conservative formulation, Guimarães argues, racial democracy was not a discourse of civil rights, nor did it leave room for race-based activism by people of color. To the contrary, Freyre's use of democracy in the late 1930s to signal Brazil's extensive mixture and its freedom from racial strictures stood in for actual political freedoms at a time when Brazil, like the Portugal Freyre idealized, was still a highly undemocratic society. With the return of democracy, Guimarães suggests, black thinkers, together with progressive white political and intellectual figures like Roger Bastide, Arthur Ramos, or Florestan Fernandes, turned away from those older, conservative, self-congratulatory interpretations of racial democracy. They drew instead on the widespread consensus about political democracy and antiracism to frame new, explicitly rights-oriented meanings for the term, using racial democracy to make demands toward an unfulfilled ideal of racial equality.⁹⁸ In Guimarães's view, in other words, black thinkers left behind racial democracy’s traditional, conservative meanings (as defined by thinkers like Freyre) and instead emphasized the term's emancipatory, claims-making potential.

In the black newspapers of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in the second half of the 1940s, black thinkers did indeed wield the idea of racial democracy in this explicitly claims-making way. Many writers called for concrete measures, such as antiracist legislation, that would make Brazil's racial democracy a reality. In February 1950, before the ratification of the Afonso Arinos Law, for instance, Abdias do Nascimento called for the discourse of racial democracy to move beyond mere rhetoric into political action. “Democracy of color [democracia de cor],” he argued, “must not and cannot be only a luxury in our Constitution, a slogan without content or effect in the daily lives of Brazilians.” Nascimento and other black writers also argued that Brazil's commitment to a “democracia de cor” should lead political parties to run more black candidates.⁹⁹ For the editors of São Paulo's Mundo Novo, support of particular black candidates would help create “the true racial democracy in which we wish to live and which we wish to build.”¹⁰⁰This rights-oriented use of racial democracy fit in with writers’ broader attempts to use political democracy to substantiate racial equality in the years between 1945 and 1950.

But writers in the black press did not always deploy racial democracy as an ideal not yet achieved, a challenge to long-standing ideas of Brazilian racial harmony. At the same time that they used the idea of racial democracy to call for concrete rights, many black writers also invoked what Guimarães suggests were the more conservative meanings of the term: a celebration of Brazil's extensive mestiçagem and resolution of racial tensions. Indeed, the line between what we might call “emancipatory” and “conservative” uses of the term was not particularly clear in the writings of black thinkers in the mid-1940s. Black newspapers in this period were peppered with references to Brazil's harmonious racial mixture and to a range of elite scholars and public figures (Gilberto Freyre in particular) whom black writers deemed responsible for popularizing this vision of the nation. Editors of black newspapers frequently let these prominent figures speak for themselves, by running reprints of works from the mainstream press and other published sources, or by commissioning essays and articles. In 1950, for instance, São Paulo's Novo Horizonte published a piece by Austregésilo de Athayde, the prominent northeastern-born white journalist and intellectual whose vision of Brazil's potential contributions to social equality and human rights earned him the position of delegate to the U.N. commission that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As part of an article commemorating Brazil's abolition of slavery and applauding the nation's racial tolerance thereafter, Athayde wrote, “The absence of ethnic prejudices among us has been universally lauded. Those who know the grave consequences of such prejudices in other countries cannot fail to congratulate themselves on the regime of peace and comprehension that marks the coexistence of men in our land, where skin color is no obstacle to anyone's success.”¹⁰¹

In Rio, Quilombo ran a regular column titled “Democracia racial,” in which a range of noted national and international intellectuals reflected on issues of race and racism in Brazil and abroad. Always aware of an international comparative perspective (and of Brazil's potential contributions to humanity), authors typically sounded the theme of Brazil's uniquely friendly interracial relations, historically and in the present. Gilberto Freyre, a fitting inaugural guest writer for this column, contributed an article titled “A atitude brasileira” (“The Brazilian Attitude”), which outlined his classic thesis in the new language of democracy: “It would not be exaggerated to say that an ethnic democracy has been emerging in Brazil, over which the sporadic Aryanisms . . . that at times have surfaced among us, have yet to prevail.” Far from falling prey to the “systematic hatreds” of the United States or Nazi Germany, Freyre argued, his conationals, shaped “since remote times” by a “process of democratization in relations among people and groups,” preferred a shared identity as “Brazilians or ‘Latins’ over each individual's particular [ethnic] origin.”¹⁰²

Along with reprinted tracts from Freyre and others, black newspapers published their own celebrations of Brazil's racial democracy. They affirmed the idea that “Brazilianness” included no discrete ethnic or racial identities, that Brazil was singular in its granting of full freedoms to people of color, and that Brazilian culture was fundamentally mestiço.¹⁰³ Abdias do Nascimento eloquently captured these sorts of uses of racial democracy among his fellow black thinkers in his August 1950 opening speech to the Black Brazilian Congress, a nationwide intellectual convention on black issues sponsored by Rio's TEN: “We note that the widespread mixture [miscigenação] practiced as a central feature of our historical formation, from the earliest moments of Brazil's colonization, is becoming—through the inspiration and stipulation of the latest triumphs of biology, anthropology, and sociology—a well-delineated doctrine of racial democracy that will serve as a lesson and model to other nations of complex ethnic formation.”¹⁰⁴

Black writers’ embrace of apparently “conservative” interpretations of racial democracy as harmonious mestiçagem was more than just a lukewarm or lamentable tactical alliance, as some scholars and activists have subsequently suggested.¹⁰⁵ In the mid-1940s, scholarly celebrations of Brazil's mestiçagem were integral to the social sciences’ rejection of biological racism, providing an authoritative baseline against which black thinkers could frame their demands for inclusion. More important, black thinkers in Rio and São Paulo welcomed new social scientific studies of race and race relations—inaugurated by Freyre himself and continued by national and international sociologists—as the symbolic bases for a particular model of black citizenship that suited their own identities as modern, educated urbanites.

Modern Scientific Principles, or, the Era of the Sociologists

Black writers in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro were keen observers of a series of projects of comparative international research that came to Brazil in the postwar period. At least since the early twentieth century, Brazilians of many different backgrounds had used the United States as a foil for discussions of their nation's racial tolerance. Most famously, Gilberto Freyre used this contrast to great effect in his portrayal of Brazil's extensive racial and cultural mixture in his 1933 Casa-grande e senzala. In 1942 this comparison received the imprimatur of the U.S. academic establishment when University of Chicago sociologist Donald Pierson's Negroes in Brazil (1942) described what its author saw as the relative absence of race prejudice in Bahia in explicit comparison with, and as a critique of, race relations in the U.S. South.¹⁰⁶ After World War II, this emergent scholarly attention to Brazil as a potential model for racial harmony found a new home in the institutions and public sphere that would come to constitute the international community. In particular, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), founded in November 1945, played a salient role in bringing Brazil to the attention of international researchers. UNESCO scholars, guided by the principles laid out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, set out in the late 1940s to understand, prevent, and find counterexamples to the racism that had resulted in such atrocities in Europe during World War II. In 1949 Brazilian anthropologist Arthur Ramos, the disciple of turn-of-the-century medical and legal doctor Raymundo Nina Rodrigues who helped revive the study of Afro-Brazilian religions in the 1930s, became director of the UNESCO's Department of Social Sciences. Ramos's appointment would place Brazil squarely at the center of the United Nations’ international antiracist projects.

Over the course of World War II, Ramos's work had shifted from a concern with Afro-Brazilian religions to a growing academic and political interest in race relations, racial movements, and the broader structural inequalities affecting people of color in Brazil. As the war drew to an end, Ramos became an outspoken critic of racism, a promoter of the social sciences as instruments of antiracism, and a champion of Brazil as a “racial democracy” and a “racial laboratory” worthy of the world's attention.¹⁰⁷ When he became director of UNESCO's Department of Social Sciences, Ramos brought together a group of leading social scientists to debate the scientific validity of race. Ramos died in 1949, before the group issued its “Statement on Race” (May 1950) calling race a “social myth” with no biological basis. Yet his project to use the social sciences to discredit racism, and specifically, to examine the potential lessons of the Brazilian experience, had a lasting effect. In the early 1950s, Ramos's colleagues at the UNESCO commissioned a group of Brazilian and international scholars to study race relations in several Brazilian cities. As historian Marcos Chor Maio argues, the UNESCO's “radical statement denying the scientific validity of the concept of race was followed by the selection of a country with a population considered the result of miscegenation, and therefore definite proof that miscegenation was universal and a refutation of the concept of a world inhabited by distinct races.”¹⁰⁸

The resulting UNESCO studies presented a mixed verdict on Brazil's celebrated racial democracy. From one perspective, these studies largely discredited the idea of harmonious race relations in Brazil, since most participating researchers agreed that the balance of power and resources was overwhelmingly tipped against Brazil's vast population of color.¹⁰⁹ Yet many researchers, roughly following the conclusions of Pierson's 1942 study, concluded that class, and not race, was the major reason for discrimination in Brazil. Marxist scholars Florestan Fernandes and Luiz de Aguiar Costa Pinto (who studied São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, respectively), for example, made it clear that racism existed and that it represented a serious obstacle to the advancement of Brazilians of color. Yet in different ways, both scholars subordinated the problem of racism, and the affirmation of black racial identities in response to racism, to broader questions of class discrimination and class struggle.¹¹⁰ In areas of the Northeast with nonwhite majorities (especially Bahia), UNESCO-sponsored studies tended to downplay the role of race and racism even further than did studies of Brazil's more explicitly racist South and Southeast. Indeed, when the UNESCO set out to use Brazil as a case study of nonracism, organizers had principally imagined conducting research in Bahia, precisely because scholarship since the 1930s had presented that city and state as exceptionally integrated along racial and cultural lines.¹¹¹ In this sense, even as the UNESCO studies challenged facile visions of Brazil as a racial paradise, they simultaneously contributed to discounting the role of race and racism as independent factors in creating and sustaining Brazil's social inequalities.¹¹²

The UNESCO's selection of Brazil as a racial research site at midcentury dramatizes not only a professed faith in Brazil as a “laboratory” of mixture and nonexistent discrimination. It also reflects a broader international moment of faith in the power of the social sciences to address social problems—in this case, what was becoming commonly known as “race relations.” In Brazil in particular, these international influences, as well as local forces, contributed to making the 1940s and 1950s what Marcos Chor Maio has called the “era of the sociologists.”¹¹³ The context of redemocratization, an increasing pace of industrialization, and Brazil's transformation into a class society guided and shaped academic inquiry. Sociology's “universalist paradigm” became the primary means of understanding, on a level of equality, the variety of forces and actors that brought about these sorts of social transformations in Brazil.¹¹⁴ Along with intense social change, the strengthening of academic institutions in the postwar period provided the context and opportunity for sociologists to imbue their science with a particular historical mission. Sociologists conceived of their field as “a rational way of knowledge that was equivalent to a superior consciousness. Through it, they would contribute to bringing about a new stage of the civilizing process in Brazil.”¹¹⁵ This sociological turn marked a significant shift away from Brazilian scholars’ earlier criminological, folkloric, or anthropological approaches to the study of African-descended Brazilians.¹¹⁶ Scholars in the new tradition concerned themselves little with the survival of African cultural traits—language, dress, food, or religion—among African descendants in Bahia and other northeastern regions. Instead, researchers like Roger Bastide, Florestan Fernandes, Luiz de Aguiar Costa Pinto, and many others used statistical analyses, interviews, and participant observation to understand the class and color disparities arising from modernization, particularly in the dynamic cities of the Southeast.¹¹⁷

This context helps us understand why the line between “conservative” and “rights-oriented” uses of ideas of racial democracy was so often blurred in the writings of midcentury black thinkers. When they invoked Freyrean visions of racial democracy as harmonious mestiçagem, black thinkers did so in the context of a broader trajectory of social scientific writing that denied the validity of race and racism and recognized black people as central actors in a modernizing Brazil. In the pages of Quilombo, black editors reprinted the writings of UNESCO-associated scholars like Arthur Ramos and Roger Bastide, a prominent scholar of Afro-Brazilian religions and Brazilian race relations teaching at the University of São Paulo, in which these scholars explicitly wielded Brazil's “hybrid vigor” and mestiçagem as proof for global audiences that race had no biological basis.¹¹⁸ In this sense, prescriptively antiracist statements by internationally recognized intellectuals, like Austregésilo de Athayde's claim that “any racist idea carries within it the potential to dissolve [our] nationality . . . [and] is therefore incompatible with Brazil,” held out the promise of harnessing the older idea of indissoluble mixture to the newer project of full rights for Brazilians of color.¹¹⁹

More specifically, for many black thinkers, social science, beginning with Freyre's works, lent authority to new kinds of claims to citizenship based on black Brazilians’ active participation in the nation. Waldemar Machado, in a 1947 article for Novo Horizonte, argued that “one must read Arthur Ramos, Nina Rodrigues, Gilberto Freyre, . . . and so many others in order to appreciate the value of the black race in Brazil,” a race that should be “undeniably recognized as a primary participant in the formation of our nationality.”¹²⁰ Writers like Raul Joviano do Amaral, an editor of São Paulo's Alvorada, saw these academic studies as a way to teach all members of society about the role blacks had played in Brazilian history. The works of what Amaral generically called “Brazilian culturalists” (possibly in reference to the post-Freyre shift from biological to cultural and structural explanations of difference) had contributed to bringing down “the unjustifiable barriers of stupid prejudices and dogmas inculcated by the mixed-race, aristocratic elites of this land.” They had also helped “the black man himself,” who, “thanks to his own titanic efforts as an autodidact, begins to perceive the true position he deserves, and his important role in our nationality.” Amaral hoped that recent developments in social theory would help shape a new national consensus about people of color's rightful place in Brazilian society. “From the wider divulgation (among all the component classes of our people) of serious sociological, historical, and ethnographic studies and observations of the relevance of the black man's contribution, there must follow a practical recognition of that relevance: granting the black man assistance commensurate with the duties imposed on him under the hard labors of slavery.”¹²¹ The social sciences, in other words, would authoritatively showcase blacks’ historical contributions, and ensure tangible recompense in the present.

Amaral and many of his midcentury contemporaries expressed the belief that there was a qualitative difference between the opportunities offered by the new sociology and the intellectual resources available to previous black writers. The range of recent “serious” social scientific studies focused on social disparities, Amaral argued, provided a newly “favorable” climate for dealing with the “black question,” displacing the “brilliant but useless” ideas of a previous generation of “chroniclers, poets, and fiction writers.” Although later critics would see black writing in the 1940s and 1950s as itself too conciliatory, Amaral and other midcentury activists saw themselves as newly forceful and criticized their earlier counterparts for appealing excessively to elite sentimentalism. Any concessions gained in this older manner, they reasoned, could only be based on pity or condescension toward people of color rather than on acknowledgment of their hard-earned rights. The new sociological studies, by contrast, set the stage for interpreting black Brazilians’ gains not as something “granted, in the name of saccharine sentimentalism; but conquered by tenacious effort, by [the black man's] persistence in making himself an economic, political, and social force to be reckoned with.”¹²² This use of a sociological turn in the literature on black Brazilians to highlight black subjecthood and agency is consistent with efforts more broadly, in the black press of the period, to base activism increasingly on what Nascimento called “a right to Rights” instead of on what Leite called “the sentimentalism . . . of dilettantes who sing the praises of black Brazilians as builders of the foundations of our nation's wealth.”¹²³

In this context, the Mãe Preta—once a cherished symbol for black thinkers seeking precisely to use “sentimentalism” to affirm their role as builders of the nation—fell even further out of favor. Already in the 1930s, most black thinkers in São Paulo had shifted their politics of belonging from appeals to the fraternal sentiments of their conationals to assertions of their own status as nationals through invocations of military or filial duty to the nation. If the latter strategy had already narrowed the space for the black wet-nurse to function as a useful symbol of black inclusion, the efforts of black writers in the second half of the 1940s to replace older appeals based on sentiment with newer arguments based on democratic rights and sociological truths made the Mãe Preta even less relevant as a symbolic resource. In the postwar years, only a very few black writers in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo still mentioned the Mãe Preta. Leite's Alvorada, in particular, continued to celebrate her holiday every 28 September. Yet even those writers had to update the symbol's meanings to make it resonate with the new mood. In an article titled “Black Man, You Are Important!,” Novo Horizonte director Arnaldo de Camargo invoked the Mãe Preta through older tropes of black males’ soldiering and labor, but added a boldness of demand and a language of rights that reflected the racial politics of his own time: “When we remember that our glorious fatherland is splattered with the brave and heroic blood of black people; when we know that the national economy always rested on the strong shoulders of the sons of the Mãe Preta, it makes us want to scream at the top of our lungs, ‘Give us what belongs to us. Our rights are equal.’”¹²⁴ Others, like Alvorada’s Sofia Campos Teixeira (one of a handful of women writing in the midcentury black newspapers and an active participant in black politics since the Black National Convention of 1945), celebrated the Mãe Preta as a humanistic figure but sharply criticized the shortcomings of the Law of the Free Womb, which earlier activists had chosen as the symbolic foundation of black citizenship and freedom.¹²⁵

For many other writers, however, the Mãe Preta's inherent sentimentalism sent the wrong political message altogether. Novo Horizonte, for instance, ran an article by Austregésilo de Athayde, the prominent writer and defender of human rights, who argued that the struggle to ensure racial equality should not take place on just any set of terms. Politics was more powerful than sentiment: “I do not want to invoke the principle of gratitude that white Brazilians should have for their ‘nannies’ and Mães Pretas. They [the Mães Pretas] would only appeal to those with well-trained hearts, whose emotions have not been desensitized by stupid pride. I prefer political reasons, drawn from the fact that three races contributed to the formation of the Brazilian people, and [that] each has merits that we must recognize and respect.” Black thinkers from the 1920s might have retorted that the “political” idea that three races participated in the “formation of the Brazilian people” was exactly the point they had been trying to make with the Mãe Preta. Indeed, in their time, they had used appeals to sentiment to counteract racist ideas supported by purportedly objective science. But by the 1940s and 1950s, the political valence of science and especially social science had largely shifted in black writers’ favor. For Athayde, and presumably for the Novo Horizonte editors who republished his article from a leading news magazine, it was recent scholarly production on black Brazilians that should provide the new source of authority for claims to black inclusion: “Those who have studied this issue maturely and at length stand ready to proclaim the veracity of the black man's cooperation toward the success of Brazilian culture and what little originality it may have.”¹²⁶ A writer from the city of Santos whose article was also reprinted by the editors of Novo Horizonte similarly argued that “tenderness for the Mãe Preta has not yet resolved the black question.” It fell on sociology, he claimed, to provide the scientific understanding that would dispel tenacious racism: “Where sentiments fail, the rigor of a sociological principle will indicate the solution.”¹²⁷ In this way, “rigorous” sociological studies of black Brazilians—built on what one black writer called “modern scientific principles”¹²⁸—replaced sentiment as a new, objective source of authority for black thinkers’ claims to being full and active citizens with equal rights, rather than supplicants subject to the whims of condescending patriarchs or paternalistic dictators.

Sometimes, in their enthusiasm for works that included black Brazilians as central contributors to the nation, writers (like Waldemar Machado, above) failed to discriminate between the derogatory, exoticizing perspective of a Nina Rodrigues and the evolving social scientific perspective of scholars like Arthur Ramos. But for most black writers who addressed the subject of the social sciences, this distinction was crucial. The new sociological consensus was attractive precisely because it allowed them to challenge the anthropological and folkloric depictions of black Brazilians that had gained such wide circulation in the 1930s, particularly those that portrayed people of color as exotic, primitive Africans—a characterization many Paulista activists in particular had worked to reject since the early twentieth century. In the September 1946 issue of Novo Horizonte, for instance, W. D. Silva noted that “there has been a great and undeniable interest—though merely an interest—in the black Brazilian; bookstores are crammed with studies about our race; but what does this literature deal with? It deals with our folklore, with what is picturesque about us, as if we were ever available exotic themes for the delight of readers of fantastical stories of Zulus, Zumbis, and who knows what else.” Not only, Silva objected, were these works “written with an attitude more of curiosity than erudition,” but blacks everywhere were then expected to act in this folkloric fashion: “They blame us for being negligent—for not having been good at continuing the practices of our grandfathers, with their ‘candomblés,’ ‘pais de santo,’ and the like.”¹²⁹ Several years later, looking back on early-twentieth-century studies of black Brazilians, José Correia Leite reached a similar verdict: “We know that since Nina Rodrigues, the analysis in these works was linked to the collection of anthropological and historical material about the process of integrating Africans into Brazil.” This “Afro-Brazilian” tradition, Leite noted, reached its peak with the Afro-Brazilian Congresses of Recife and Bahia in the 1930s. “But we must note that these works’ central point of interest had . . . to do with the bizarre, the picturesque and exotic to be found in the rich color of our folklore.” In the end, Leite argued, much of what was “said, studied, and researched about the black Brazilian” in that heyday of anthropological investigation ultimately cast people of color as outsiders in their nation. Those studies were more about “the black than the Brazilian.”¹³⁰

These statements reflect a continued, even deepening, conviction among many black thinkers that associations with exotic Africa, even when couched in terms of Brazilian folklore, tarnished their status as “Brazilians.” Particularly among Paulistano black writers, any interest in Africa—which a handful of writers like Leite had staunchly maintained throughout the 1930s—sharply declined in the postwar years. This change was most visible in Leite's “O mundo negro” columns, which after appearing in O Clarim d'Alvorada in the early 1930s reemerged with significantly different content in Alvorada in the mid-1940s. Originally inspired by Garvey's writings in The Negro World and a space fervently dedicated to promoting the “unity of old and new world blacks,” the column in the mid-1940s became almost exclusively devoted to following racial affairs in the United States. In part, as the editors claimed, this shift had to do with the notable progress that black North Americans had begun to make after the end of the war.¹³¹ But it also reflected transformations in the international academic environment. In the 1930s Leite had worked to portray Africa, and diasporic and pan-African politics in particular, as dynamic and modern. His coverage of Garvey's movement had been central to that attempt. But his efforts swam against the current of prevailing perceptions, among black thinkers and Brazilians more broadly, of Africa's inherent primitivism—perceptions, Leite and others believed, enhanced by prominent anthropological studies of Afro-Brazilian culture and religions. By the 1940s, even Leite appears to have greeted with some relief the emergence of sociological studies that left Africa entirely aside and instead approached the study of race in Brazil within the same comparative framework as the modern, industrialized United States.

If Leite's column hardly mentioned Africa in this period, the few authors who did evinced mostly disdain for the continent. One writer in Novo Horizonte, for instance, confessed his “nostalgia” for the “Motherland from which our ancestors came” but went on to demarcate his deep cultural distance from Africa. Referring to a photo of a smiling young African girl dressed in beads and animal skins, the author exclaimed, “At least she is happy, because she is barbaric, savage, and without consciousness of what we call civilization.”¹³² And an article in Senzala included a joke about an African native who, taking to heart a missionary's injunction against polygamy, proceeded to eat all but one of his wives.¹³³

If they occasionally belittled and mostly ignored Africa, writers in the postwar black press were noticeably more vocal about their dislike for the Brazilian Africanisms that had risen to national notoriety through the anthropological writings of the 1930s. Black writers emphasized their own status as civilized, modern, cultured Catholics, distinguishing themselves as much as possible from the subjects of Afro-Brazilian anthropology. Even in Rio de Janeiro, where the practice of African-derived religions had been more widespread than in São Paulo in the first half of the century, outright denunciations of Candomblé or Macumba were not uncommon. João Conceição, a special contributor to Quilombo, drew a bold line between progress and the “primitivism” of African religions. He argued that in order to “move forward,” people of color themselves had to “correct many of our errors and ways,” among them “certain primitive habits, the mystifications of African religions.”¹³⁴ In São Paulo, José Correia Leite called for black activists to challenge “the stigmas of atavistic inheritances that have undermined a forward-looking image of blacks in national life.”¹³⁵ The advancement of blacks as modern citizens, in these formulations, stood in direct tension with the persistence of African “atavisms” and religious practices.

These anti-African pronouncements had a clear regional component, one that had already begun to emerge in the writings of some black Paulistanos in the 1930s. Black writers in postwar Rio and São Paulo made a clear distinction between themselves, as representatives of a modern, industrial, truly Brazilian South, and the inhabitants of the distant Northeast, with their “earthly and uncivilized pleasures of exotic and sensual dances to the tune of barbaric music.”¹³⁶ Against the grain of the anthropologists of the 1930s, and much more consistent with a previous generation of thinkers influenced by scientific racism, they took the position that these primitivisms should be eradicated. “It is in Bahia,” a reprinted article in Novo Horizonte declared, “that we find the greatest [African] religious influence, even making it necessary for the local police to take action, initiating persecutions against those sorts of base spiritism—candomblé and macumba.”¹³⁷ This image of a barbaric, backward Afro-Bahia thus provided a foil against which many southern black intellectuals constructed their own identities as modern nationals.

What bothered black writers from São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro about anthropological or folkloric approaches to the study of African-descended Brazilians was not just the harmful associations they appeared to establish between blackness and barbarism. In the eyes of many southeastern black thinkers, anthropological studies of Afro-Braziliana (much like the “sentimentalism” many of them disdained) cast people of color as objects, rather than as active subjects, and zeroed in on black cultural difference at the expense of the kinds of race-based political activism they themselves practiced. As early as 1940, in a rare issue of O Clarim d'Alvorada edited in the midst of the Estado Novo, writer Luiz Bastos published a critique of the study of Africanisms in Brazil that foreshadowed the mood of the upcoming decades. Titled “Where Is Afrology Heading?,” Bastos's article denounced the transformation of black Brazilians into material for “aspiring Afrologists [candidatos a afrologistas]” who, seeking to advance their careers, could simply “go to the terreiro, watch the batucadas [ritual drumming] . . . and then run to the library to write a formidable article ‘about the blacks’ with several citations in English, German, and Latin.” For Bastos, “underneath that superficiality that sees the black man as a thing and not a living being, what we find is an accentuated race prejudice.”¹³⁸ He concluded his critique by exhorting “Afrologists” to “set themselves a more concrete and perhaps more fruitful task: becoming militants in the cause of uplifting the black man socially and morally and . . . at last, incorporating him into the Brazilian Nation.”¹³⁹

In 1950 the editors of Quilombo, Abdias do Nascimento and Alberto Guerreiro Ramos, echoed Bastos's critique. As they put it in one of their columns, “ethnological” studies of Brazilians of color had turned their subjects into no more than “primary material for scholars.” These works, they added, presented an image of black Brazilians as nearly mummified creatures, frozen in a distant past: “Every time that blacks were studied, it was with the evident purpose or the ill-disguised intention of considering him a distant being, almost dead, or even packed up in straw like a museum piece.” By contrast, in the period between 1945 and the early 1950s, the sociological approach seemed to offer a politically engaged alternative to anthropology's static objectification of people of color. Announcing the objectives of their First Black Brazilian Congress of 1950, Nascimento and Guerreiro Ramos explicitly contrasted their planned academic event to the northeastern anthropological congresses of the 1930s run by Gilberto Freyre and édison Carneiro: “Our event has no links—except very remote ones—with the Afro-Brazilian Congresses of Recife (1934) and Bahia (1937). Those congresses were, in a sense, academic—mostly distant from popular cooperation and participation.” The Black Brazilian Congress of 1950, they hoped, would be significantly different from those earlier anthropological endeavors. “A sociological congress par excellence, ours aims to discover mechanisms that will accelerate the process of integration among blacks and whites begun by our historical evolution.” They expressed the hope that the politically informed works presented at the event (most of them by people of color themselves) would fundamentally change the ways academics approached the study of Brazilians of color. Sociology, with guidance from black intellectuals like Nascimento and Guerreiro Ramos, would show people of color no longer as “primary material for scholars” but as active agents, “builders of their own conduct, of their own destinies.”¹⁴⁰

Consistent with their critique of the TEN as an elitist cultural organization, Rio's União dos Homens de Cor favored the new sociology on slightly different terms. Like most other writers in the postwar black press, the UHC's leaders drew on social science for the authority it gave to antiracist claims. On the cover page of their 1953 special supplement A Voz da Negritude, for instance, the editors cited sociologist Donald Pierson's assertion that “underneath [the world's] cultural diversity is a common human nature, universal to the human species.”¹⁴¹ Yet for the UHC's leaders, sociology was a remedy not primarily for the excesses of cultural anthropologists but for the excessive focus that many black thinkers placed on elite cultural productions, such as plays and academic events. José Bernardo da Silva's participation in the TEN-sponsored Black Brazilian Congress of 1950 stressed the need for fewer “cultural congresses” and more “objective” action on behalf of black Brazilians—a goal he believed was being ignored in favor of high theory.¹⁴² Those cultural movements, his colleague Joviano Severino de Melo explained in an article, “are very interesting and useful for showing the dominant class the value, the culture, and the creative capacities of blacks,” but they did little for the people as a whole.¹⁴³ Sociology, the UHC's leaders held, should provide a tool for valorizing and helping less fortunate people of color rather than for buttressing the status of a black intellectual elite. As Silva argued elsewhere, “It is wrong to believe that only the cultured blacks of our land can think correctly. Afro-Brazilians of the popular classes are simple men but have extremely acute observational skills.” He called for “a meticulous study of the psychology of black popular classes [to] give sociologists a better comprehension of that ethnic group.”¹⁴⁴

As these statements illustrate, black thinkers in this period expected to be much more than passive recipients of the benefits of broader academic transformations. Like their colleagues from the TEN or the UHC in Rio, men of color in São Paulo also attempted to seize and to shape the emerging sociological field of “race relations” studies. In the early 1950s José Correia Leite, Jayme de Aguiar, Francisco Lucrécio, and several other veterans of the city's black movements participated as informants in the research projects of leading white sociologists like Florestan Fernandes and Roger Bastide.¹⁴⁵ Indeed, when José Correia Leite looked back in the early 1960s on transformations in “black studies” at midcentury, he argued that black activists in Rio and São Paulo, then “in the midst of great activity,” had played a crucial role in the shift from a primarily anthropological perspective in black studies to a dominantly sociological one. Leite dated this transformation to Arthur Ramos's 1938 visit to São Paulo when, in Leite's words, Ramos encountered “an intense black movement of ideological content.” (Ramos had, in fact, visited and corresponded with leaders of the Frente Negra since the mid-1930s).¹⁴⁶ In Leite's view, it was this “intense black movement” that accounted for Ramos's intellectual shift toward the study of race relations and his closer involvement with black politics. More broadly, Leite's reminiscences portrayed works focusing on southeastern activism's “ideological content,” rather than on the Northeast's “religious cults, dances, music, cuisines, and things of folklore,” as responsible for the shift away from “poetic sentimentalism” in the study of black Brazilians. Indeed, the academics who figure most prominently (and positively) in the black press in this period—Arthur Ramos, édison Carneiro, and Roger Bastide—all transitioned in the postwar years from studying African cultural traits to studying issues of race and race relations and became closely associated with or involved in the black politics of the 1940s and 1950s.¹⁴⁷

As a whole, then, writers in the black newspapers of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in the second half of the 1940s showed a dramatic preference for sociological scholarship over the anthropological approach to the study of black Brazilians that had taken hold in the 1930s. This may seem surprising today, given the evolution of anthropology to reject the notion of the primitive and to recognize that all cultural forms are the product of an active process by which people construct meaning in their lives. But at the time, sociology seemed more powerful to black thinkers on several levels. The shift to sociology further discredited an earlier consensus on biological racism and whitening with a celebration of not just mixing but also explicit antiracism. It helped to shift the focus of research on race from African subcultures to modern social structure. It highlighted the dynamic racial politics of southeastern activists. Finally, it supported interpretations of citizenship based on agency and rights rather than pity or patronage. But as the pronouncements of black thinkers like Nascimento, Guerreiro Ramos, and Leite suggest (and as leaders of the UHC astutely observed), the sociological perspective conferred agency on people of color not by granting a new role to the black masses but by creating a formal space for the interventions of black thinkers and activists into national intellectual life. In the sociological works that postwar black thinkers embraced, the “black man” who was to become an agent in modernity looked very much like themselves. For southeastern writers, who often expressed disdain for African religions and their practitioners, the question of whether black Brazilians were cast as active agents or passive subjects did not necessarily reflect an inclination to defend the black practitioners of Candomblé. Rather, it reflected a concern for their own role as intellectuals who would represent and help guide their race. In many ways, then, southeastern black intellectuals’ preference for sociology illustrates their position in between white intellectuals and the black masses, as they attempted to define black Brazilian citizenship in their own image in the heady first years of democracy's return.

In 1982, at a moment when black activists in Brazil firmly dismissed racial democracy as a deceitful myth, an older Abdias do Nascimento expressed his distaste for his and other activists’ “excessively conciliatory behavior toward liberal whites” at midcentury. Nascimento particularly singled out his own assertion, in his pronouncement to the Black National Congress of 1950 that racism did not exist in Brazil. “We know this to be contrary to historical truth,” he declared three decades later, “and I can only, at this moment, berate myself for those excesses of tolerance toward the racists of this country.”¹⁴⁸ Yet in the second half of the 1940s, black thinkers in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro used the widespread idea of racial democracy, and even of Brazil's indissoluble racial mixture, to push forward their demands for racial equality. Nascimento and others linked the emerging discourse of racial democracy with an international language of rights and political freedoms to craft seemingly universal and scientific claims for black inclusion that, they believed, exceeded the reach of earlier claims based on sentimental, familial metaphors like fraternity or filial duty. Black thinkers in these years also established close ties with leading social scientists, helping to redefine scholarship about race in ways that suited their own political and intellectual goals and reflected their own racial, class, and regional identities. And at times, as in the case of antiracist legislation, black intellectuals in this period were able to leverage the dominant discourse of racial democracy to effect legal and political change.

By 2002, when Nascimento republished Quilombo, he looked back on this period once again, and saw it with new eyes. “The appeal to the principle of democracy,” he explained, “constituted, at that point, the most powerful weapon for social demands and political struggles. The motto of racial democracy fit into that context, and the leadership of the black movements brandished it like the banner of Ogum [the orixá or deity of justice in Candomblé].”¹⁴⁹ Placed in the context of the democratic promise of the immediate postwar years, Nascimento realized, black leaders’ engagement with ideologies of racial democracy was not a shameful betrayal of the cause of racial justice but a crucial part of their struggles for that cause. Understanding why black leaders embraced the promises of racial democracy in these years helps us see the black movement's rejection of racial democracy in the 1970s not just as the product of a different political consciousness among a later generation of activists but also as the result of many older activists’ intense disillusionment with the shortcomings of the racial democracy that had appeared possible at midcentury.

Indeed, the intensity and visibility of black leaders’ attempts to claim the language of democracy for race in this optimistic half-decade in many ways sparked the beginnings of the conservative backlash against which activists like Nascimento would later mobilize. The bold demands of black thinkers, black newspapers, and black organizations in the second half of the 1940s quickly revealed the ideological fissures in the apparent consensus surrounding Brazil's racial democracy. The more insistent black thinkers became in their attempts to brandish the banner of democracy for antiracism, the more energetically conservative proponents of racial democracy used similar ideas to delegitimize black demands. By the early 1950s, as the high hopes surrounding Brazil's new democracy began to wear off, black thinkers across Brazil would find themselves fighting not just to encourage a progressive ideal of racial democracy but, increasingly, to resist complacent or repressive definitions of racial democracy that stressed cultural, racial, and political assimilation.