Manuel Querino: Activism and Education for Freed-persons

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On 13 May 1888, the “Golden Law” officially abolished slavery in Brazil – the last country in the Americas to do so. For abolitionists like Manuel Querino, it was a huge achievement. The following year, a coup overthrew the monarchy, exiled Pedro II and his family – including Princess Isabel, the signatory of the “Golden Law” – and established the First Republic. As a life-long republican, Querino must have felt that this, too, was a dream come true, the outcome of many hard-fought struggles. Unfortunately for him and, even more so, the people recently emancipated from slavery, the new republic did not represent a step forward for Black people or their culture. Instead, it viewed Afro-Brazilian culture as “backward” and many of its expressions were criminalised, including candomblé and capoeira. Worse, the new government defunded or closed schools that had once provided vocational and higher education that would have been accessible to the poor, including those whose emancipation brought no reparations. Querino was aware of this, protested it and even felt the consequences.

Because of all the difficulties, obstacles and challenges freed-persons faced during the post-Abolition period, 13 May has become a controversial date for Black activists and their allies. Is it really something to celebrate? Today, November is Brazil’s Black History Month. Black Consciousness Day is celebrated on 20 November, the date when Zumbi dos Palmares, the last leader of possibly the oldest and certainly the best known quilombo or maroon community, was betrayed and killed.

Despite the controversy, I am sure that Querino and many Black activists like him would have celebrated 13 May in his day as a major milestone in Brazilian history – one that he personally worked hard to achieve as a militant journalist and activist.

To learn more about Querino’s fight against racism and support for the education of freed-persons, read Black Atlantic Crossings and Manuel Querino (1851-1923), available on Amazon and other online booksellers.

Black Atlantic Crossings in Black and White

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We originally published Black Atlantic Crossings: The Lives and Anti-Racist Tactics of Booker T. Washington and Manuel R. Querino with full colour illustrations, but printing costs may make it unaffordable for many readers. As a result, we decided to publish an alternative paperback edition in black and white. (The cover is the same.) It costs £12.72 ($16.99 in the US) and is even available in Australia and Japan! https://amzn.eu/d/5V2BwqN

The Roots of Black Dandies and Fashion at the Met Gala

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In 2025, the theme of the Met Gala was “Black dandies,” a phenomenon believed to date back 400 years, since the Black diaspora forcibly began. I was struck by the connection with chapter 5 of Black Atlantic Crossings, which focusses on the anti-racist tactic of portraying Black people in “gala dress.” Booker T. Washington was very careful to depict the faculty and students of the Tuskegee Institute (now an historically Black university) in a dignified manner and suppressed any images that might reinforce negative stereotypes. Manuel R. Querino went even further, by publishing photographs of Black people who practised a then-stigmatised and proscribed (read, illegal) religion and enslaved people who were clearly proud of their appearance. I particularly love the photographs of two iyalorishas (high priestesses) of one of Brazil’s best known Afro-Brazilian religious communities, the Gantois terreiro in Salvador, Bahia. Here is one of those photos:

HIgh priestess of the Gantois Afro-Brazilian religious community

Note her regal pose, not unlike the cartes de visite produced by royalty, as well as her gorgeous jewellery and sumptuous clothing. The African wrapper draped over her shoulder is an insignia of her rank. Her name was Maria Júlia da Conceição Nazaré, the founder of the Ilê Axé Iyá Omin Iyamassê, better known as Gantois.

“Destined to become a Classic”: Esteemed Scholars on Black Atlantic Crossings

/ Sabrina Gledhill, PhD / Leave a comment

I am delighted to share these blurbs from highly respected scholars:

As promised, Sabrina Gledhill’s research does, in fact, expand the Black Atlantic by putting into dialogue the ideas and activism of two giants of the African Diaspora in the Americas. The legacy of Booker T. Washington has been well known, including in Brazil, since the turn of the twentieth century. However, in addition to reinterpreting his legacy in a broader context, this book introduces the English-speaking reader to Manuel Querino, an insightful and multifaceted Afro-Brazilian thinker who is little known outside Brazil. Enjoy reading this original work, which is destined to become a classic.

João José Reis, Universidade Federal da Bahia, author of Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia

Black Atlantic Crossings is a timely reflection on the challenges that African American intellectuals faced in the aftermaths of slavery in Brazil and the United States. While not always understood or accepted by later commentators, the anti-racist activism of Manoel Raimundo Querino and Booker T. Washington, ably analyzed by Sabrina Gledhill, profoundly challenged the emerging post-slavery hierarchies. She demonstrates that there is much to learn from these two men’s lives and the evolution of their historical memory in the century since their deaths.

Hendrik Kraay, University of Calgary, author of Bahia’s Independence: Popular Politics and Patriotic Festival in Salvador, Brazil, 1824-1900

Crossing the Atlantic requires navigating a sea of stories through rough and calm waters, amidst fleeting encounters and enduring dialogues. In this insightful work, Sabrina Gledhill offers more than just a theoretical compass. Her sophisticated approach reveals the profound oceanic connections that shaped Booker T. Washington and Manuel R. Querino, revisiting them as original Atlantic characters, without borders, but with transnational margins.

Flavio dos Santos Gomes, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, co-author of The Story of Rufino: Slavery, Freedom, and Islam in the Black Atlantic

Great news! Black Atlantic Crossings is officially here in Kindle e-book. paperback, and hardcover editions. Find your copy today at Amazon, Waterstones, and other booksellers.

Cover of Black Atlantic Crossings, by Sabrina Gledhill

May Day is the Big Day!

/ Sabrina Gledhill, PhD / Leave a comment

Mark your calendars! We’re thrilled to announce the upcoming publication of Black Atlantic Crossings: The Lives and Anti-Racist Tactics of Booker T. Washington and Manuel R. Querino on May 1st, 2025 (Labour Day)!

For the first time ever, English-speaking readers will have the opportunity to delve into this ground-breaking work exploring the lives and crucial anti-racist strategies of two pivotal figures in the Black Atlantic world.

Get ready to discover their interconnected stories and their powerful approaches to challenging racial injustice.

You can purchase your paperback or hardback copy from Amazon on May 1st! It’s already available as an e-book.

Black Atlantic Crossings will also be sold by other booksellers, including Waterstones, shortly after the initial release.

We can’t wait for you to embark on this important journey with us. Share the news!

Fighting Historical Erasure, One Book at a Time

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Preface to Black Atlantic Crossings

This is an updated and expanded translation of Travessias no Atlântico Negro: reflexões sobre Booker T. Washington e Manuel R. Querino, released by the Editora da Universidade Federal da Bahia (EDUFBA) in 2020. That year also saw the birth of my grandson John Benjamin, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the beginning of the global Black Lives Matter movement, which transformed what was once considered “niche” research into a highly relevant study. I now see this book as a weapon against historical erasure and a staunch defence of affirmative action and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), which are facing unprecedented assaults in the USA.

According to Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act,” any book (fiction or non-fiction) that makes White people feel uncomfortable about their country’s slaveholding past should be suppressed. Florida’s State Academic Standards—Social Studies (2023) even recommend teaching middle-school students how enslaved people benefited from slavery because, “in some instances,” it enabled them to learn useful skills.[1] Also, as I was translating the original Portuguese edition, the Supreme Court of the United States effectively gutted affirmative action in that country.

On January 21, 2025, President Donald J. Trump issued an executive order dismantling DEI initiatives across federal agencies, urging similar action in the private sector. This resulted in the removal of references to Black, Brown, LGBTQ+ individuals, and women, from government websites. That decree, followed by criticism of the Smithsonian Museum’s efforts to debunk pseudoscientific racism, further amplified this book’s relevance.

In Brazil, former president Jair Messias Bolsonaro attempted to gut higher education—particularly the Humanities—and expressed hostility towards Black civil rights and affirmative action. As a result of his policies, many Black Brazilian students dropped out or simply stopped aspiring to a university degree. Now that Bolsonaro is out of office and may even go to prison for an alleged coup attempt, the Lula administration is undoing some of the damage wrought during Bolsonaro’s time in office. Nevertheless, there is still a long way to go.

The landscape of Brazilian academia and publishing has changed substantially since I defended my PhD in Salvador, Bahia, in 2014. Initially, researching Booker T. Washington in Brazil posed considerable challenges, requiring reliance on international sources and archival research at the US Library of Congress. However, my thesis and the Portuguese edition of this book have helped establish Washington’s presence within Brazilian scholarly discourse, as demonstrated by their increasing citation and use in post-graduate programmes. Graciliano Ramos’s bowdlerised translation of Up from Slavery, Memórias de um negro (retitled Memórias de um negro americano), is back in print for the first time since the 1940s (Washington’s best-known autobiography still awaits a fresh and more objective rendering).

Efforts to reverse the erasure of Black people from history should never abate, and sometimes, they are rewarded. I wish I had made a note of the date, but the moment I felt that Manuel Querino had finally regained his rightful place in Brazilian history was when Lula—then a presidential candidate—mentioned his name along with the usual pantheon of illustrious Black Brazilians, such as Machado de Assis, Teodoro Sampaio, and Luiz Gama.

The year 2020 saw two publications on Querino—a book on his studies of Bahian cuisine by Jeferson Bacelar and Carlos Alberto Dória, published in Brazil, and Manuel Querino (1851-1923): An Afro-Brazilian Pioneer in the Age of Scientific Racism, an anthology of essays by several authors which I edited and published in Portuguese and English in Brazil (through the Sagga Editora publishing house) and the UK.

Gláucia Maria Costa Trinchão and Suely dos Santos Souza published the edited volume Os saberes em desenho do professor Manuel Raymundo Querino, on his geometric design textbooks, in 2021. It includes reproductions of those illustrated works—an invaluable contribution, as the original editions are rare.

The Afro-Brazilian polymath’s profile was raised significantly in 2022 by the Projeto Querino podcast. Inspired by The New York Times’s 1619 Project, it follows in Querino’s footsteps by increasing awareness of Black people’s role in Brazilian history—including Querino’s own contributions.[2]

In 2023, the 100th anniversary of his death, Querino received several tributes. The video maker Isis Gledhill produced a documentary on his life, including interviews with leading Querino scholars, and with the organisers and presenters of the Projeto Querino podcast, the journalist Tiago Rogero and the historian Ynaê Lopes dos Santos. The conductor and composer Fred Dantas wrote a piece for brass band called “Dobrado Manuel Querino” that was first performed during the celebrations of the bicentennial of Bahia’s Independence on the 2nd of July, a date that was particularly dear to Querino’s heart.

In 2024, I edited and published more two edited volumes inspired by Querino and including translations of his work: The Need for Heroes: Black Intellectuals Dig Up Their Past, and Heroes Sung and Unsung: Black Artists in World History. Along with Manuel Querino (1851-1923) and this monograph, they form part of Funmilayo’s Unsung Heroes in Black History series.

Although I began researching this book in the early 2000s, and some of its contents date back to my MA studies on Brazilian race relations in the 1980s, its message feels more urgent than ever. I hope this comparison of the lives and anti-racist tactics of Booker T. Washington and Manuel R. Querino will point up the fact that reparations are still due to the descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States and Brazil. Affirmative action remains a crucial tool for addressing the enduring legacy of racial injustice.

Sabrina Gledhill

Black Atlantic Crossings will be available as a Kindle e-book on 14 April 2025 and on Amazon and other booksellers as a paperback and hardback on 1 May 2025.

[1] Florida’s State Academic Standards—Social Studies, 2023. SS.68.AA.2.3 “Examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g., agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation). Benchmark Clarifications: Clarification 1: Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” https://www.fldoe.org/core/fileparse.php/20653/urlt/6-4.pdf

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/06/brazil-history-african-brazilians-tiago-rogero-querino-project. The podcast is available (in Portuguese) at https://projetoquerino.com.br/podcast/

On Historical Erasure

/ Sabrina Gledhill, PhD / Leave a comment

Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letters from an American” on March 17, 2025, documented the current US administration’s removal of content related to people of colour, women, and anyone else considered “DEI” from government websites, including figures buried in Arlington Cemetery and the Navajo code talkers. This is a real and present instance of the historical erasure my research seeks to counter. My edition of The Need for Heroes: Black Intellectuals Dig Up Their Past was published in 2024 precisely to amplify Black scholars’ voices and ensure the preservation of historical narratives about soldiers and maroons of African descent, narratives that must be repeatedly shared and republished to prevent their being forgotten. That same year, I also published Heroes Sung and Unsung: Black Artists in World History. The title speaks for itself.

Carrying on this work, my forthcoming publication, Black Atlantic Crossings: The Lives and Anti-Racist Tactics of Booker T. Washington and Manuel R. Querino, expands on these themes. Here is the genesis of this book:

In the mid-1980s, I stumbled upon a figure who was largely unknown outside Brazil. Manuel Querino, an Afro-Brazilian polymath, was quoted in the epigraph to Jorge Amado’s Tent of Miracles. As I was then pursuing an MA in Latin American Studies at UCLA, I mentioned Querino to my supervisor, the esteemed E. Bradford Burns. It turned out that he had not only published an article about Querino and translated the introduction to one of his works but he had also featured Querino prominently in his History of Brazil. Rather than a biography, Professor Burns encouraged me to delve into a comparative study, contrasting Querino’s perspectives on Africans and their descendants with those of other Brazilian intellectuals active before 1930—a pivotal year when the academic study of Africans and their descendants gained acceptance in Brazil. These intellectuals included Nina Rodrigues, whom I positioned at one extreme of the spectrum of “racial pessimism,” with Querino at the other. Nina not only believed in Black inferiority but also that mixed-race people were destined to die out due to their moral and physical frailties.

In late 1986, I went to Brazil for preliminary PhD research and ended up staying for twenty-eight years—but that’s another story . While I hadn’t planned to continue studying Querino, I was incensed by the distortions of his legacy. Worse than being erased, his reputation had been actively tarnished by overtly racist interpretations of his life and work. For example, it was wrongly assumed that he died a pauper and was insignificant because he was buried in a “poor people’s cemetery” (a claim proven inaccurate). Academics cast doubt on whether Querino was the inspiration for Pedro Archanjo, the protagonist of Amado’s Tent of Miracles. His scholarly output was also underestimated. Meanwhile, Nina Rodrigues was celebrated as the father of anthropology in Brazil. Fortunately, I was not the only one who was passionate about defending Querino’s memory and retelling his story—accurately, this time. Scholars like Jaime Nascimento and Maria das Graças de Andrade Leal were also writing and editing books about him. Nascimento organised seminars and lectures and graciously included me in the line-up of speakers.

By the time I finally went on for a PhD at the Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA) in 2010, Leal had published a biography of Querino focussing on his work as a politician and labour leader. My interest was still focussed on his defence of Africans and their descendants, but since my PhD thesis had to be “original”, I decided to compare and contrast Querino with Booker T. Washington, a Black educator the Afro-Brazilian scholar specifically admired. The result was a study that was published in Brazil in 2020 as Travessias no Atlântico Negro: reflexões sobre Booker T. Washington e Manuel R. Querino. An expanded, updated translation is now in press, entitled Black Atlantic Crossings: The Lives and Anti-Racist Tactics of Booker T. Washington and Manuel R. Querino.

On People, Ideas, and Crossings

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Foreword to Black Atlantic Crossings, by Sabrina Gledhill (forthcoming)

In recent decades, social scientists have been studying connections, links and dialogues involving intersecting ideas, people and circuits. Transnational perceptions of intercultural movements have been revealed. At different times and in different spaces, from the fifteenth century to the first half of the twentieth, the populations of diasporic societies and their social, political and economic structures were linked in the four corners of the Atlantic. Using pieces of what was invented as Europe and designed as Africa, the parts called Cuba, Brazil, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Haiti, Martinique, Mexico, Guadeloupe, the USA, Barbados and others were linked together and redefined. Fundamentally, experiences and people produced events that were transformed into narratives.

Above all, intellectual constructs and the elaboration of ideas were processed in different contexts, reconnecting different projects and expectations. We can see the emergence of ideas around modernity and liberalism, engaging in dialogue with racism, forced labour, exclusion, and vectors of citizenship under construction.

In this complex process, we can think about intellectual roots, their agents, and the circulation of ideas, reframing ideologies and bringing together colonial, slavocratic, post-colonial and post-emancipation societies.

Today, however, it is the people involved in these processes who are mobilizing scholars and research the most. How did ideas circulate? What were the vectors? And what were the levels of reception, transformation and influence? We still need to take a careful look at the literate circulation and oral unfolding of Atlantic ideas. Books and translations came into people’s hands. International news abounded in the nineteenth-century press. Since the 1830s, debates on emancipation in the British Caribbean and its consequences were closely followed, gaining shape in the mid-nineteenth century in the French and Dutch Caribbean, Spanish America and, after the US Civil War, Puerto Rico, and Cuba.

How did Black intellectuals—albeit immersed in slavocratic societies— interpret and re-elaborate these processes? Not just by receiving ideas, but by producing and circulating them in an elaborated way. Sabrina Gledhill’s research, presented in this book, opens paths for us to get to know this adventure of ideas and its Black Diaspora characters. It begins with Manuel Querino, an outstanding intellectual and working-class leader at the turn of the twentieth century. Born on the fringes of the Bahian hinterland, amid slavery and the cholera epidemic that made him an orphan, Querino crossed some boundaries of exclusion. He learned to read and write at a very young age. This guaranteed him a brief military career as a clerk during the Triple Alliance War (1865-70). Still pursuing his studies, he entered the School of Fine Arts, studying geometric design, architecture, and later working as a teacher at the Liceu de Artes e Ofícios (School of Arts and Crafts) and the Colégio dos Órfãos de São Joaquim (St. Joachim Orphans’ College) in the city of Salvador. In the 1870s and 1880s, he was active in the abolitionist movement, joining anti-slavery societies and founding at least two newspapers. His political life was extended at the end of the century when he joined the Workers’ Party. He produced technical writings on geometric drawing and the arts, as well as humanist essays on Africans and the Black presence in Bahia.

Some of the highlights of Querino’s life and work, which are explored in Gledhill’s study, are precisely the Afro-Atlantic dimensions of his thinking, particularly his dialogues and interlocution with the ideas of Booker T. Washington (1856-1915). Thus, this is both a biography and an intellectual history with an Atlantic perspective. Receptions, appropriations, translations and resignifications reveal different roots of the Brazilian social thinking that was emerging in the first decades of the twentieth century. Urban development, exclusion, access to education, trade unions, elections, political parties, African scenarios and debates on race and colonization are the subjects of intersecting elaboration and dialogue that this pan-Africanist Bahian intellectual established.

However, we also need to know more about the intellectual landscapes framed by Querino. We will certainly find generations of Black intellectuals and literati who tried to turn skills, education and expectations of mobility into weapons in a society that was still aristocratic in Bahia, amid tremendous arrogance due to the social invisibility and economic exclusion of the Black population. More than learning about his life and chapters of tremendous personal determination, it is essential to read Querino himself. The subjects he analysed and the intellectual worlds he expanded demonstrate the Black social thinking that was made invisible at the dawn of the twentieth century. We know that these processes of intellectual erasure were recurrent. It is not a matter of being absent, non-existent or invisible. Silencings have been verified. But not just that. We have identified other Black Diaspora thinkers among Querino’s interlocutors. Not just Du Bois or Marcus Garvey, and even other non-Americans with the same origins. In Brazil, we know very little about the activities and legacy of Booker T. Washington. Why is that? On what basis did Querino establish the dialogue? What were the universes of the influences he saw? Making these connections and dialogues emerge takes us on an Atlantic voyage to the intersecting circuits of ideas and people. It is important to use stronger lenses in our observations. Querino and his work were guided by religious expressions with African roots, political parties, elections, representations, workers’ conferences and intellectual affirmation.

More than pointing out the shores of the Black Atlantic from analytical ships on calm seas, we must disembark, locating unstable and improvised territories. This study not only offers a safe haven, but, above all, charts the way forward.

Flavio dos Santos Gomes

Flavio Gomes is a Brazilian historian and author. His writings include books and articles on maroons published in Portuguese, English, French, and Spanish. The winner of the prestigious Jabuti Prize and a Guggenheim Fellow, he has been a professor of History at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) since 1998.

Exciting new titles are coming this year

/ Sabrina Gledhill, PhD / Leave a comment

Black Atlantic Crossings: Discover the ground-breaking anti-racist strategies of Booker T. Washington and Manuel R. Querino in this insightful translation and adaptation. Explore the transatlantic exchange of ideas that shaped Black activism in the early 20th century.

Dance of the Serpent: Delve into the captivating life story of capoeira mestre Cobra Mansa. From his early days in Brazil to his international influence, this biography traces his journey as a martial artist, teacher, and cultural ambassador.

Stay tuned for release dates and pre-order information!