Black Jacobin, Black Girondin: Reconsidering Luiz Gama in Life and Posterity

Luiz Gama was one of an exceedingly small handful of men of generally acknowledged African ancestry to achieve great prominence in the politics of the late Brazilian Empire. Born free in 1830 in the city of Salvador da Bahia, one of the principal nodes of the Atlantic slave trade, he was sold illegally into slavery at age ten and caught up in Brazil’s internal traffic in captive men, women, and children. Through twists and turns, that traffic took him to the city of São Paulo—capital of the province, and later state, of the same name—where he regained his freedom and became a famed lawyer and a prominent figure in local and regional public life, much mourned at his premature death in 1882. Remembered today chiefly as an abolitionist, and to a lesser degree as a poet, he was, more than anything else, a democrat, an outlook reflected in his antiracism, his freethinking, and his republicanism, as well as his abolitionism. Along with making that case for a forgotten essential unity to Gama’s thinking and practice, this paper seeks to elucidate and to explain his life’s trajectory from illegal enslavement to hard-won freedom, success at the bar, and political leadership. Finally, the paper turns to posterity and thereby to two additional sets of explanations: how the essential unity of Gama’s life’s work and thought came to be obscured, and how it came to be that a man who rejected race while fighting racism and celebrating black beauty came to be embraced by a society understood to be white, as the state of São Paulo increasingly was across the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, as shown in Barbara Weinstein’s prizewinning The Color of Modernity and other recent works of history.