Luiz Gama

Luís Gonzaga Pinto da Gama (21 June 1831 – 24 August 1882) was a Brazilian lawyer, abolitionist, orator, journalist and writer,

Born to a free black mother and a white father, he was nevertheless made a slave at the age of 10, and remained illiterate until the age of 17. He judicially won his own freedom and began to work as a lawyer on behalf of the captives, and by the age of 29 he was already an established author and considered "the greatest abolitionist in Brazil".

Although considered one of the exponents of , works such as Manuel Bandeira's "Apresentação da Poesia Brasileira" do not even mention his name. He had such a unique life that it is difficult to find, among his biographers, any who do not become passionate when portraying him – being himself also charged with passion, emotional and yet captivating.

He was a black intellectual in 19th century slave-owning Brazil, the only self-taught and the only one to have gone through the experience of captivity. He spent his life fighting for the abolition of slavery and for the end of the monarchy in Brazil, but died six years before these causes were accomplished. In 2018 his name was inscribed in the Steel Book of national heroes deposited in the Tancredo Neves Pantheon of the Fatherland and Freedom.

Panorama from the time São Paulo, where Gama lived for forty-two years, was in the middle of the 19th century a still small provincial capital that, with the demand for coffee production from the 1870s on, saw the price of slaves reach a level that made their urban possession almost prohibitive. Until this period, however, it was quite common the property of "rent slaves", on whose work their owners drew their source of sustenance, alongside the so-called "domestic slaves". in the centre from the city of Salvador, Bahia. Even with little information about his childhood, it is known that he was the son of Luísa Mahin, a freed African ex-slave, and the son of a Portuguese fidalgo who lived in Bahia. At the age of seven, his mother traveled to Rio de Janeiro to participate in the Sabinada revolt, never to meet him again. In 1840, his father ended up in debt with gambling, so he resorted to selling Luís Gama as a slave to pay his debts. There is no evidence that his father sought him out after that. As an adult, Gama understood that when he was sold he was a victim of the crime of "Enslaving a free person, who is in possession of his freedom.", provided in Article 179 from Criminal Code of the Empire of Brazil, sanctioned shortly after his birth. Furthermore, due to the fact that the revolts that took place in Bahia led to the prohibition of the sale of slaves from this province to other regions of Brazil, the sale and transport of Luís Gama to São Paulo was constituted as contraband. A patache, a type of sailing vessel in which Luís Gama traveled as a slave. In an autobiographical letter he sent in 1880 to , he describes his birth and early childhood thus:

Lígia Ferreira, one of the researchers who has most studied Gama's life, points out that this information could not be verified, although she stresses that the sobrado where he was born still exists; the register of his baptism could not be found, and adds to this the fact that the omission of his father's name from his account casts doubt on his real identity.

Researchers Lisa Earl Castillo and Wlamyra Albuquerque announced the discovery of new documents in the Bahia State Public Archives that they claim contain previously unpublished information about Luiz Gama’s life, which could lead to new theories regarding his birth, childhood, and parentage.

Among the documents found was the alleged baptismal record, registered at the Parish of the Blessed Sacrament and St. Anne in the city of Salvador in October 1831, which is said to have been the first baptism—in contrast to the second baptism, which is said to have taken place years later but has never been found:

Luis Parvulo

On the second of October, eighteen hundred and thirty-one, in this parish church of the Holy Sacrament and St. Anne, I solemnly baptized and anointed with the holy oils LUIS, a mixed-race child, three and a half months old, son of Luiza, a slave of Maria Rosa de Jesus, unmarried, residing in this parish; his godfather was Antonio Agostinho, unmarried, residing in the same parish. And for the record, I have drawn up this entry, which I have signed. The Vicar, Manoel Coelho de S. Payo Menezes.

Put up for sale, he was rejected "for being Bahian". After the Malê revolt, a stigma was created that Bahian captives were rebellious and more likely to run away.

But Gama also wrote articles for other newspapers, in which he discoursed on socio-racial issues of Imperial Brazil. In an article entitled Foro de Belém de Jundiaí, published in , Gama denounces the decision of a judge who, after the death of a slave master, allowed the auction of a former slave who had been freed by his heir son. His journalistic and legal actions brought him many enemies, and the author Julio Emílio Braz even claims that Dioguinho was hired to assassinate him when Gama was nearing the end of his life, but a letter written to his son on September 23, 1870, makes it clear that he had been suffering threats against his life for some time.

In 1866, still with Agostini, now joined by , they founded the hebdomadário ; all three belonged to the same Masonic lodge, and shared the same republican and abolitionist ideals.

During a jury, Gama uttered a phrase that became famous: The slave who kills the master, in whatever circumstance, always kills in self-defense – this provoked such a reaction from those present that, with the confusion, the judge was forced to suspend the session. An article in the Estado de São Paulo also says that Gama never wrote these words in exact, and historian Bruno Rodrigues de Lima says that this concept reappears several times in his work. In one example, in the Letter to Ferreira de Menezes dated December 18, 1880, when defending 4 slaves considered "four Spartacus" by Gama, who had murdered the son of their master Valeriano José do Vale, and had been executed by 300 people while inside the prison by "...the knife, the stick, the hoe, the axe...", Gama said:

An equivalent sentence was published on August 19, 1882, as the subtitle of the article "To the slavocrats", written by Raul Pompeia, in the Abolitionist Center's newspaper "ÇA IRA": "Before the Law, the crime of homicide perpetrated by the slave in the person of the master is justifiable".

Ethnic views Luís Gama was against African descendants who acted like whites or even became cruel slavers, and he thought it was funny to see slavers of multi-ethnic origin trying to pass themselves off as whites. About his father, he said, "My father, I dare not claim that he was white, because such claims, in this country, constitute grave danger before the truth". Colonel Teodoro Xavier hated Luís Gama for having already lost a slave to him, so he called him "Goat", trying to insult him, to which one day, the lawyer replied: "I am not a goat, I am black. My color does not deny it. A goat is your honor who intends to disguise, with this light color, the mulatto underneath".

Political activity In his political activities Gama was affiliated to Liberal Party and before the he had already exposed his ideas in the article "The American Brazil and the lands of Cruzeiro without king or slaves" published on December 2, 1869. Later, Gama was part of the group that for the first time tried to found a republican party and on July 2, 1873, he came to participate in the First Republican Congress, already part of the Republican Party of São Paulo, where he found that the party and its members, many slave owners, did not care or interest themselves in the abolitionist agenda. Because he believed that abolition should be immediate and without compensation to the slaveholders, he left the party and started criticizing it in the media, and these criticisms also extended to newspapers that claimed to be in favor of the abolitionist cause, but published advertisements about the capture of slaves.

Death and burial The writer Raul Pompeia had already noticed that Gama's health was not good; three days before his death he had observed that Gama no longer climbed down the stairs of his office without support, resorting to the support of his friends Pedro, Brasil Silvado, or himself, Raul.

Gama had diabetes. On the morning of 24 August 1882 he had lost his speech and despite the intervention of more than 20 doctors, this was the causa mortis that victimized him that afternoon, certified by physician Jaime Perna.

People of all classes were there, and all vying for the chance to carry the skiff. At one point, the slave driver carried on one side, and on the other, a haughty, "poor, ragged, barefooted black man", in Pompey's register. It was already evening when the procession finally arrived at the Consolação holy ground, and the crowd held its ground. After a brief stop for a sermon by a priest in the chapel, where the hundreds of wreaths of flowers were laid, the coffin was finally taken to the grave, where the crowd was waiting. Before lowering it, however, someone – the doctor or , shouted for everyone to wait; after a brief speech in which he remembered the importance of Luís Gama, bringing everyone to tears, he summoned everyone to swear an oath not to let "die the idea for which that giant had fought": this was answered by a general roar from the crowd, which, hands extended to the coffin, swore.

His grave was purchased on the same day as the burial in the name of his wife Claudina, as recorded in Book 2, fols. 28, of the Municipal Archives; it is located on 2nd Street, grave 17.

A milestone of this action was the invasion of Chácara Pari by members of the Brás Abolitionist Club, with cries of "Long live the abolitionists, let the slavocrats die!"; people such as Barbosa, Antônio Bento, Feliciano Bicudo, among other notables and anonymous, became part of the police's list of suspects.

Some years after his death, and following the Abolition, the Luís Gama Lodge was founded by the São Paulo Freemason Góes and the collaboration of brothers from the Trabalho and Ordem e Progresso lodges, with the initiation of 25 blacks.

In his honor, in 1919, the (currently FEPASA named one of its stations, today practically in ruins.

Between 1923 and 1926, in what may be considered the "second period of the black press" in the state of São Paulo, the newspaper Getulino appeared in the city of Campinas; in this city racism was stronger than in the state capital itself, and the publication was part of the movement for greater participation of blacks in society; its title was a "tribute to Luís Gama who had as one of his pseudonyms Getulino" and its influence would culminate in the creation of O Clarim da Alvorada, a newspaper in the São Paulo capital.

In Largo do Arouche, in São Paulo, there is a erected to his memory, erected on commission by the black community on the occasion of his centennial.

Over time it influenced several black Brazilian movements, such as the literary group Projeto Rhumor Negro of São Paulo, created in 1988, for whom Gama's letter to Mendonça is "one of the most important historical documents of the Brazilian people. (...) Given the magnitude of the life of this great man, this letter, crossing time, is also addressed to all of us".

In 2014, in the wake of the success of the movie 12 Years a Slave, writer Ana Maria Gonçalves, author of the novelized work about Gama's life Um Defeito de Cor (A Color Defect), prepared a script for a movie and also drawing the attention of Brazilian television – pointing out that very little is said about slavery compared to other historical facts, such as the holocaust during World War II. In 2015 the play "Luiz Gama — Uma voz pela liberdade" ("Luiz Gama – A Voice for Freedom") was started, with actor and scriptwriter Deo Garcez as the protagonist and actress Nivia Helen as narrator and various characters.

In 2015, the Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil conceded the title of attorney of law to Luis Gama in a ceremony in the Law School of Mackenzie Presbyterian University. This homage was proposed by Professor Silvio Almeida, President of Luiz Gama Institute, and nowadays Minister of Human Rights and Citizenship of Brazil.

In 2017, the University of São Paulo Law School, in Largo de São Francisco, named one of its rooms after him. In 2018 his name was inscribed in the Steel Book of national heroes deposited in the Tancredo Neves Pantheon of the Fatherland and Freedom

In 2019, it was announced that filmmaker would make a film on the life of Gama, with as the character in adulthood. The film, then in production, was temporarily titled Prisioneiro da Liberdade (Prisoner of Liberty), also would feature actors Caio Blat and Zezé Motta. The name of the film came to be Doutor Gama, with as the main character, and was released in 2021.

Also in 2019, the comic book Província Negra was published after winning the city of São Paulo's Fomento Cultural edict, portraying a fictional adventure based on the life of Gama, who takes on the role of the protagonist in the adventure. The script is by Kaled Kanbour and the art by Kris Zullo.

In 2021, the University of São Paulo posthumously awarded him an Honoris Causa doctorate, the first black Brazilian to receive this title from the university.

Title of "lawyer" 133 years after his death, on November 3, 2015, the Order of Attorneys of Brazil, São Paulo Section, granted him the title of "lawyer", since he was not trained and acted as a "provisioned" or abolitionist. The tribute ceremony, entitled "Luiz Gama: Ideas and Legacy of the Abolitionist Leader", included two days of events at Mackenzie Presbyterian University, through debates and lectures. The tribute is unprecedented in the history of the Order of Attorneys of Brazil; according to its national president, , "It is a very fitting tribute to someone who fought so hard for freedom, equality, and respect".

Image Abroad The Black Past website, focused on global African and African American history, has a page with the poet's biography.

In March 2020, the workshop "Slavery, Freedom and Civil Law in the Brazilian Courts (1860–1888): How the Black Lawyer Luiz Gama Developed a Legal Doctrine that Freed Five Hundred Slaves" took place at Princeton University.

Complete work Historian Bruno Rodrigues de Lima, from the Max Planck Institute, spent nine years going through archives and registry offices looking for the complete works of Luís Gama, in a project for the publication of ten volumes and approximately 5,000 pages in Portuguese entitled Obras Completas [Complete Works (of Luiz Gama)], alongside the publisher Hedra. The project, published out of order, will be fully released by 2022.

Bruno Rodrigues has researched to create Luís Gama's timeline starting when he published his first text at the age of 19, and among his research findings is the fact that he was already recognized as a lawyer in his time, not a rábula- and that this denomination may have been created to diminish him.