Portrait of Nilo Peçanha

Nilo Peçanha, the first black president of Brazil, at his desk. Born in 1867 in the Rio de Janeiro city of Campos dos Goytacazes, Nilo Peçanha stood out in the political scene of the First Republic (1889-1930). He was a federal deputy, senator, president of the State of Rio de Janeiro, vice-president and President of the Republic and Minister of Foreign Affairs. In 1921, he ran for President of the Republic against the official candidate Arthur Bernardes, in the "Reação Republicana" campaign; despite being defeated, the movement shook the unstable political alliance between state oligarchies that supported the republican regime. He died in Rio de Janeiro, in 1924. Despite his national political prominence, Nilo sometimes had to face malicious comments due to the fact that he was mixed-race and the son of a merchant, which fueled the opposition of his wife Anita's family to marriage between the two. The photographs and illustrations of the time tended to attenuate the Afro-descendant features of his physiognomy so that he would be better accepted in a society that promoted official policies of "whitening" the population, through European immigration.