Racisms: Black Struggles in the Free Labor

Another free Black man who dreamed and fought for freedom years before abolition was the rábula, journalist, and poet Luiz Gama (1830-1882). Rábula is how was called a non-graduated but licensed attorney. And that was how Gama became known for defending hundreds of causes of freedom in the courts of São Paulo. Because he was illegally enslaved in childhood by his own father, a white man, Gama ended up being led to realize the immense number of people in a situation similar to his own. They were victims of crimes and should be recognized as free under Brazilian law. When confronting advocates of slavery and other injustices, Luiz Gama collected numerous episodes of what we today denominate racism.

José do Patrocínio (1853-1905) was another Black abolitionist whose trajectory helps us to understand the challenges experienced by the people to assert themselves in freedom. He was a pharmacist, journalist, and politician, who concentrated his actions in Rio de Janeiro. Attentive to endeavors to prolong the legality of slavery,he contributed to struggles for abolition throughout Brazil. Despite being a Republican, he supported the movement of the imperial government for the immediate end of the system of human labor’s exploitation. In the celebrations of abolition, he was greeted by many Black individuals and groups who recognized him as representing their best future projects. At the same time, he was defamed by many others, accused as the “last sold Black man”...At Rádio Amefricana, we can hear about a case of racism denounced a year after the abolition, by the newspaper Cidade do Rio, edited by Patrocínio.

Are we part of the “free labor”?

During the imperial period, domestic work was one of the main occupations for women in urban centers in every region of Brazil. They were free, freed, and enslaved women. From the second half of the 19th century onwards, the dynamics and organization of this profession underwent changes that were directly related to the transformation of ideas of race and gender in the country. A process that were directly related to the concern of elites with the increase in the number of Black people living in freedom.

Labor movements and the Black struggles for freedom

Black people were also in the first rows of Brazilian factory workers. In the 19th century, a considerable number of factories that existed in different regions of Brazil relied on the work of Black men and women either free, freed, or enslaved. The political performance of these people in the workers' movement was also a reality. Empowered by the abolitionist struggles, this was an important front in the fight against racism. In this context, Vicente de Souza was an abolitionist, republican and Black socialist. Although he was born in the city of Nazaré, Bahia in 1852 as a free man, it was in Rio de Janeiro, where he graduated as a doctor, that he stood out in the political struggles in defense of abolition, education, and workers' rights.

The Revolt of the Whip, revolt against the racism

In 1910, more than two decades after the formal abolition of slavery, Black sailors stood up against the continuity of mistreatment and physical punishment that were common in the slave times and were still part of the Brazilian Navy's routine. Led by João Cândido, the “Almirante Negro” (The Black Admiral), the “Revolta da Chibata” (Revolt of the Whip) stopped the city of Rio de Janeiro until its demands been solved. However, many of those involved in the uprising were persecuted, arrested, killed, or sent to work in the Amazon. After the revolt, João Cândido was detained at the Hospital dos Alienados as a “madman”. In 1912, he was acquitted and released. Then he became a stevedore and a fish seller. Born free in 1880, in the city of Encruzilhada do Sul, he died in 1969, in Rio de Janeiro.

The Black Working Class states itself

Black newspapers have been fundamental in the fight against racism endured by the Black Working Class since the 19th century. The newspaper Getulino was an emblematic example of the early 20th century. It was founded in the city of Campinas in 1923, owned by Andrade & Moraes, and directed by Lino Guedes and Gervásio de Moraes and lasted three years. In its September 9, 1923 edition, it denounced a fabric factory that prevented the presence of Black women workers in its assembly line and highlighted that the action was against abolitionist ideals. On November 11 of the same year, the newspaper recorded a police action in the city's tenements, from which Black women were being captured to serve as domestic servants. These episodes of exposing racism are reminiscent of those that, decades ago, individuals like Luís Gama and José do Patrocínio also reported in the press, remembered by Rádio Amefricana.

Ain’t we workers?

In the context of the creation of the Consolidação das Leis Trabalhistas - CLT, the domestic work was excluded in the legislation enacted in 1943. In this process, many politicians were against the extension of the laws related to working hours, vacations, rest hours, and conditions of safety at work for this category. Ozeas Motta, at the time, representative of employers in the Labor Court of Justice, was one of the politicians who defended exclusion, with the argument that domestic work was not part of the idea of working under capitalism. At the time, this category had already established itself as a mostly Black profession.

Developmentalism and racism

As the major bet on national developmental projects, industries were spaces that marked the contrast between a large number of Black workers and the few white individuals, almost always occupying positions of authority. Although denied as promoters of the country's development, Black workers can be seen in many of the photographic records produced throughout the 20th century. An example are the images of the construction of the Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional (CSN) in the city of Volta Redonda-RJ during the 1940s. At this episode of Rádio Amefricana, we present some reports made by workers from the period.

Domestic workers get organized!

At the same time, domestic workers were organizing themselves in other regions of the country to claim rights for the category. At the Congresso Sindical de Trabalhadores do Brasil (Brazil Unions’ Workers Congress), which took place on September 11, 1946 in São Paulo, Laudelina de Campos Melo, president of the Associação Beneficente das Domésticas de Santos, and Clícia Ambrozio, representative of domestic employees in the capital of São Paulo, claimed their right to unionize.The Rádio Amefricana tells us more details about Laudelina de Campos Melo's long history of struggle.

To claim their rights, Black militants sought to occupy elective positions in political parties, composed mostly of white men from national elites. Elected as Constituent Congressman by the state of Bahia in December 1945, Carlos Marighella (1911-1969) exercised his mandate by listening and defending the demands of the proletariat, being especially attentive to the specificity of the women worker experience. In Bahia, other Black workers ran for office in the same period. This was the case of Juvenal Souto Junior, Bernardete Santos, Celina Maria Monte, Cosme Ferreira, Jaime Maciel and Sebastião Nunes de Oliveira.

The persistence of inequality

After the Civil-Military Coup, civil construction continued to be an important employer of Black men and women in the federal capital, revealing how the persistence of inequality was part of the modernity project that founded the city. In this context, the Radio Amefricana presents us some records from the efforts of the dictatorial state and its supporters to control Brasilia’s domestic workers and even to avoid them access to formal education.

Struggle for Democracy
The Brazilian redemocratization and the reorganization of social movements are two intertwined processes. One of its milestones is the founding of the Movimento Negro Unificado - MNU (Unified Black Movement) in 1978. During this period, it is possible to observe the wide dialogue between workers' movements, anti-racist, anti-sexist movements and the fight against homophobia in the construction of the idea of citizenship that should be refounded. Among these dialogues, the São Paulo Sindicato dos Metalúrgicos held, in 1984, a seminar on racial discrimination in the labor market. Our radio remembers the importance of Black intellectual Lélia Gonzalez in the struggle for democracy in Brazil. In the same period, the author created the category Amefricanidade, to address the common experiences and relations of solidarity among Black people in the Americas.

The debate between work and racism continued strong in the domestic workers movement. Dona Laudelina, who in 1946 defended the right to unionize domestic workers in the Workers' Congress, passed through the entire military dictatorship maintaining her struggle, which led to the regulation of the profession in 2015.

Across the country, the anti-racist struggle, led by organizations and individuals linked to the Black Movement, got stronger in the 1980s. This process gets its peak precisely at the Centenary of Abolition, when the attempts to celebrate the date in a celebratory way were confronted by the denunciation of racism that led to an intense mobilization for a stronger effort to overcome inequalities. Under the influence of activists from the Black Movement, the Sindicato dos Metalúrgicos was one of the many entities that stood in favor of combating racism.

In 1988, the Marcha Contra a Farsa da Abolição (March against the Fakery of Abolition) was held in Rio de Janeiro. In the poster, designer Luiz Carlos Gá exposes the perversity of the May 13 idea by juxtaposing the reproduction of a lithography by Johann Moritz Rugendas, made in the early imperial period, and an image made by photojournalist Luis Morier in 1982 and published in Jornal do Brasil with the caption: "All blacks, in line, rope around their necks, detainees walk to the trap. Like slaves". Between the two contexts, “nothing has changed”, says the poster. Finally he invites for the change, which would start on the next May 11. We conclude this episode of Radio Amefricana with the poem Operário (Worker) by Paulo Colina (1982). With this poetic record of the writer and activist who started to work in São Paulo in the late 1970s, we can see how the issue of decent work was in the mouth of those who struggled against racism during the process of democratization.