This talk critiques the place of post-abolition controls over free Black people in the United States (e.g. Jim Crow laws, convict leasing, debt peonage, violent displacement and alienation of property) in both scholarship and methods of teaching Brazilian race and race relations. Rather than an absence of exploitive segregationist policies and legislation applied to free Afro-Brazilians, there were well-established patterns of Brazilian labor coercion and restrictions to citizenship, that were rooted in fifteenth century Portuguese crown policies that criminalized poverty to force Portugal’s free poor into service as soldiers of colonization, to both populate and defend its growing empire. Such methods were transferred to Brazil’s fast growing free Black population more than a century before abolition. In contrast to the post-Reconstruction United States, post-abolition Brazil saw little need for a new system of controls over free Afro-Brazilians.

Zachary Morgan is Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University. His first book, Legacy of the Lash: Race and Corporal Punishment in the Brazilian Navy and the Atlantic World (Indiana University Press, “Blacks in the Diaspora” series, 2014), is an examination of organized resistance among Afro-Brazilian sailors to the ongoing abuse they endured in the navy at the hands of the Brazilian state. His second book project (tentatively titled Forced Labor in the Age of Abolition: Masking Segregation in Brazil’s Long Nineteenth Century) examines the means by which the Brazilian state (in conjunction with state-run institutions such as the army, navy, legislature, police force and orphanages) coerced Brazil’s growing free-black population into continued labor both preceding and during the breakdown of Atlantic slavery in the nineteenth century.