Luiz Gama

Luiz Gonzaga Pinto da Gama was born free in Salvador, Bahia, on the twenty-first of June 1830, the son of Luiza Mahin — a free African woman from the Mina coast active in the 1835 Malê revolt of Salvador's African Muslim community — and a Portuguese father whose name he refused throughout his life to disclose. When he was ten his father, ruined by gambling, sold him illegally into slavery in São Paulo despite his free birth — a crime under the Constitution of 1824.

He taught himself to read and write while enslaved as a domestic servant in São Paulo. At seventeen he escaped, secured documents proving his free birth, and obtained employment as a clerk in the São Paulo police. Over the next two decades he taught himself the entire civil and criminal code of the Empire of Brazil and qualified by examination as a rábula — an attorney admitted to court practice without university training.

From 1865 until his death he conducted the longest and most consequential career of any nineteenth-century Brazilian abolitionist lawyer. He brought freedom suits before São Paulo courts that established the legal doctrine — later codified by the Law of the Free Womb of 1871 — that any African brought to Brazil after the 1831 prohibition on the slave trade was legally free regardless of subsequent sale. The number of enslaved Brazilians he liberated through the courts is conservatively estimated at five hundred and possibly exceeded a thousand.

He published the Republican newspaper Diabo Coxo and the satirical journal Cabrião. He died of diabetes in São Paulo on the twenty-fourth of August 1882, at fifty-two — six years before final abolition.

He is honored here as the self-taught lawyer who freed more enslaved Brazilians through the courts than any abolitionist of his generation.