Find out who was the first black deputy in Brazil – 11/09/2023 – Power

Amidst the peak in the number of slaves brought to Brazil and a turbulent Independence, a black man stood out, capable of rising to the political elite despite racism and becoming an advisor to Dom Pedro 2º, defending the right to property and at the same time the freedom of captives.

This is Antônio Pereira Rebouças, son of a Portuguese tailor and a freed enslaved woman. He was the first brown deputy in the country after becoming a self-taught law student and receiving a special concession to practice law throughout the territory of the Brazilian Empire.

With political activity and liberal thinking, he participated in a series of movements in favor of the emancipation of Brazil from Portugal and worked to consolidate individual rights. He denied his color to avoid being labeled a radical or being rejected in the spaces of power he frequented.

Known as “conselheiro Rebouças” or even “old Rebouças”, his surname is printed on an important avenue in the west of São Paulo, also in honor of the abolitionist André Rebouças and the engineer Antônio Pereira Rebouças Filho, his descendants.

Born in Maragogipe (BA) in August 1798, he was the youngest child among three other men and five other women. Two days before he was born, the Bahian Conjuration broke out in Salvador, which called for the independence of Bahia from Portugal, the abolition of slavery and a democratic and republican government.

He was unable to study formally beyond the elementary education at the time, so he focused on law on his own while working in a notary’s office. In 1821, he received permission to practice law only in his native province, being authorized to practice law throughout the country in 1847.

During the effervescence of tensions between the metropolis and the colony, which was rehearsing independence, he participated in groups for the political emancipation of Brazil, calling for the installation of a constitutional government, made up of Brazilians.

He was a defender of liberalism as a political practice and philosophical thought — the context was the dissemination of the corollary added by the French Revolution in 1789: freedom, equality and fraternity.

Hence the defense of equality before the law, regardless of color or social class. Rebouças saw possibilities for the inclusion of enslaved people in the imperial legal configuration, without the need for further institutional disruption, and for this reason he is not considered an abolitionist.

During his terms as a deputy, he opposed the death penalty and participated in debates to reform the 1824 Constitution, the first in the country and the only one in the Empire.

He invested in education as a way to achieve social and financial stability. Along with José Bonifácio and other liberals, he believed that free labor was not only more profitable, but more profitable than the slave regime.

Because he was mixed race — descended from a white father and a black mother —, Antônio Pereira Rebouças considered himself different from other black people, despite not being seen as equal by the white people who surrounded him in the spaces he frequented.

That is why racism permeated all of his political activities. After political defeats in Salvador, he decided to move to Rio de Janeiro in 1823, and was prevented from following his path in Porto Seguro, needing to prove his identity to continue.

The following year, when he was appointed and took office as secretary of the Provincial Government of Sergipe, he suffered repression from local landowners due to his skin color and for being in charge of important Executive matters.

It is from these events that the politician starts to make the fight for civil rights central. Even so, he did not refer to the racial issue directly — he tried to make his merits a central theme and avoid making his color a political problem.

In 1828, he was elected deputy for Bahia for the first time, re-elected twice for his native province and a fourth time, representing Alagoas, in 1845. He was also provincial deputy for Bahia between 1834 and 1845, since at the time it was possible to hold both positions parliamentarians.

He avoided making any association between his color and his liberal positions, fearing that he would be considered radical in the face of a series of uprisings of enslaved people, such as the Malês Revolt, in Bahia, and the Carrancas, in Minas Gerais.

From an academic point of view, he became known for being one of the first Brazilians to discuss the Haitian Revolution, present in the imagination of Brazilian planters, who feared something of the same magnitude in Brazilian lands. Rebouças saw the uprising as a way of advocating against racial discrimination, despite not taking a clear stance against slavery.

Author of works on history and civil law, his area of ​​expertise, he left a library with complete works by Molière, Pierre Corneille, Blaise Pascal, Montesquieu and Mirabeau, all precursors of the French liberal thought that the politician followed.

In 1865, after the death of his wife, Carolina Pinto Rebouças, the politician retired from public life, being appointed lawyer to the State Council of the Empire in 1866. In 1870 he retired, after being struck by blindness.

He died ten years later, in Rio de Janeiro. He left eight children, including the abolitionist André Rebouças and the engineers Antônio Pereira Rebouças Filho and José Rebouças, also remembered in monuments, roads and other works throughout the country.

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X-ray | Antônio Pereira Rebouças

The country’s first black deputy, he was born in Maragogipe (BA) in 1798, but moved to Salvador and then to Rio de Janeiro. He was a self-taught lawyer and advisor to Dom Pedro 2º. He was government secretary of Sergipe, member of the General Council of Bahia in 1828 and parliamentarian of the province between 1835 and 1845. He founded and worked on the newspaper “O Bahiano”, and received the title of officer of the Order of Cruzeiro. He died in 1880 in the capital of the Empire.