May 13th: The False Abolition of Slavery in Brazil

   
On this day in 1888, Princessa Isabela of Brazil, acting as Regent while her father Dom Pedro II was traveling in Europe, signed the Golden Law (Lei Áurea) which legally ended slavery in the country. Brazil was the last country in the New World to legally end slavery.

Various social pressures and economic conditions led to the law, including the abolitionist movement in Brazil led by Joaquim Nabuco, pressure from England (looking to create a more competitive market for its own colonial agricultural products, like sugar), and the declining profitability of slavery as poor European immigrants came to Brazil in search of work.

Preceding abolition in Brazil, two significant laws had already freed slaves over 65 years of age as well as children born of slaves (although few slaves lived til 65 years of age and the children were required to serve their mothers' masters until they reached 21 years of age.)

Many in Brazil commemorate this day as the Day of "False Abolition" (Falsa Abolição) because the law did nothing to guarantee a better life for the hundreds of thousands of slaves in Brazil, like providing education, or land or monetary grants. This effectively kept them from advancing, and even participating, in Brazilian society. The effects of this policy can be discerned today in the large black underclass and institutionalized racism prevalent in Brazil.

In this way, a benevolent princess did not give freedom to blacks in Brazil, but rather, blacks fought, and continue to fight, for their own poltical, social, and economic freedom in a country ruled largely by a white elite.