What happened to formerly enslaved people in Brazil after abolition?

Morning on the farm

Picture someone who woke up free on a coffee farm in the Paraíba Valley, the heart of Brazil’s coffee country, on May 14, 1888. The law that had freed them the day before ran to two sentences. It said nothing about where they would live, what they would eat or who would pay them.

Many stayed where they were, now working for wages, usually very low ones. Staying did not mean nothing had changed. Freed workers bargained for things they never had before: set working hours, small plots of their own, and above all the right to walk away. Owning land was another matter. Brazil’s Land Law of 1850 made public land available only to those who could buy it, so few freed families could. Some settled on unclaimed land or near old quilombos, the communities built by people who had escaped slavery.

The road to the cities

Thousands left. In Rio de Janeiro, freed people crowded into tenements and onto the hillsides, and into the old port districts of Saúde and Gamboa, near the wharf where so many Africans had once been landed. There they rebuilt families, festivals and working lives, away from their former masters. The area came to be called Pequena África, Little Africa, and it is remembered as the cradle of samba.

In São Paulo, the story took a different turn. European immigrants came to the province in large numbers mostly after abolition, to work the coffee plantations.

The masters’ bill

The law paid nobody. The former masters went to the government asking to be compensated for the people they had lost as property, and got nothing. The freed people were offered nothing at all. The planters’ anger reshaped politics: many abandoned the monarchy and became known as the republicanos de 14 de maio, the “May 14 republicans,” and eighteen months later, on November 15, 1889, the Empire fell. In December 1890 the republican finance minister Rui Barbosa ordered the ministry’s papers on slavery burned, an order historians connect to those same claims: see Why did Rui Barbosa order Brazil’s slavery records burned?.

The warning

Some abolitionists had seen this coming. André Rebouças, a Black engineer and one of the most respected of the Empire, argued that freedom alone was not enough: without land and without school, the freed would stay poor. His program, which he called rural democracy, aimed to break up the great estates. The abolitionist deputy Joaquim Nabuco wrote five years before the Lei Áurea:

Once the last slaves have been torn from the sinister power that the curse of color represents for the Black race, it will still be necessary to cut down, through a manly and serious education, the slow stratification of three hundred years of captivity, that is, of despotism, superstition and ignorance.

For Nabuco, abolition was only the beginning. A century later, Brazil’s 1988 Constitution recognized the descendants of quilombo communities as the definitive owners of the lands they occupy. The law of 1888 itself is explained in What was the Lei Áurea?.