Black history

Celebrating Black History Month 2025 in the UK

/ Sabrina Gledhill, PhD / Leave a comment

The Significance of October

Black History Month (BHM) in the UK, observed every October, is a vital annual affirmation of the continuous and profound contributions of people of African and African Caribbean descent to British life. This month provides a crucial, focussed period to move beyond narrow, often fragmented historical narratives and instead highlight the sprawling, centuries-long legacy of Black individuals who have shaped society, culture, and intellectual life globally. While this annual celebration is necessary, its deeper purpose is to seed the knowledge and understanding that must take root all year long.

Celebrating the Sung and Unsung

The history recognised during BHM is one defined by both immense resilience and extraordinary creativity. We rightly honour the legacies of the Windrush generation and literary voices like Bernardine Evaristo and Zadie Smith. Yet, the crucial task is to move beyond the surface and uncover the foundational stories that support them. This commitment to wide recognition is central to Funmilayo’s mission, perfectly embodied by titles such as The Need for Heroes, which powerfully advocates for recognizing aspirational Black leadership, and Heroes Sung and Unsung, which is dedicated to illuminating the pioneering figures often overlooked by mainstream history. These works remind us that heroism and talent exist at all levels of society, waiting to be acknowledged.

The Global and Transatlantic Thread

BHM demands that we understand Black history not just as a British concern, but as a global, interconnected force. We must look beyond national borders to grasp the full scope of Black intellectual achievements. For instance, Funmilayo’s scholarship on the Afro-Brazilian polymath, Manuel Querino (1851–1923): An Afro-Brazilian Pioneer in the Age of Scientific Racism, demonstrates how pioneering thought emerged in the face of brutal institutional racism. Further expanding this view is Black Atlantic Crossings, which emphasizes the vital transnational dialogues between figures separated by geography, challenging us to see Black experiences as an integral thread within the fabric of global history.

A Promise of Year-Round Learning

Ultimately, the dedicated month of October serves as a powerful catalyst for a broader cultural shift. By promoting the rigorous recovery and visibility found in publications like Black Atlantic Crossings and Heroes Sung and Unsung, we fulfill BHM’s promise. The month is a joyous celebration, but it is also a renewed promise to maintain a year-round focus where the accomplishments and heritage of all Black people, from the famous to the previously forgotten, are recognized, valued, and taught without end.

Feedback on “Heroes Sung and Unsung”

/ Sabrina Gledhill, PhD / Leave a comment

It’s Black History Month in the UK, but our goal is to ensure the accomplishments of Black people worldwide are celebrated and studied all year long. A reader of Heroes Sung and Unsung: Black Artists in World History recently sent us an email with her feedback, which we wanted to share with you:

“Heroes Sung and Unsung really speaks to the reader, and every story you’ve included brings that person back to life.  What I find is that I’m reading a chapter, and then the stories will trickle around in my mind, and send me back to re-read a story and see what else I can find out about the person.  

“Two of them stand out for me in particular.  

“The most heart-wrenching story I’ve so far come across in your book is that of  Richard Lonsdale Brown.    He seems to have been so modest in his own estimation of his abilities, needing to seek out George de Forest Brush, the artist in New York, to bravely approach him and ask if de Brush thought that he could ever become an artist.  Imagine how differently things would have turned out, had de Brush not been so encouraging and taken on Brown as a pupil, and taken him to de Brush’s summer home in New Hampshire to paint the scenery there.   After all the discouragement that Brown received when he tried to make his way on his own in New York, at least we know that his skill in landscape painting was at last recognised, and an exhibition of his work was held on Fifth Avenue.    However, although the obituary on page 51 indicates that the exhibition netted him a sufficient sum to begin his studies”, other mentions on the internet indicated that he struggled to pay his way as an artist, and ended up returning to live with his parents for precise reasons which nobody seems to know.     Before leaving New York, he seems to have expanded his repertoire beyond landscapes to design and decoration, such as an illustration for the front cover of the Christmas Crisis of 1915, with a powerful, bold and colourful illustration of ‘The Star of Ethiopia’ (reproduced in the link below).    There was also an interview he gave in 1913, also reproduced in the link below, in which Brown sets out his thoughts on how Negroes (to use the term he gave in the interview) were perceived:

May I say without being thought guilty of egotism or a desire to boast, which is far from my intention, that I think that what I have accomplished and what has been accomplished by other negroes in other lines gives proof that the negro is capable of worthy things, and that the conception of many white persons that the negro is good for nothing but manual labour and such other work as does not call for much mental effort is not only unfair but incorrect?  After a people have been held down for centuries, as we have been, is it to be expected that we should in only fifty years of freedom equal or even approach the white race in every particular? Many persons, even today, gain their ideas of the negro from story books, while it is a fact that many educated persons who have not had the opportunity to know the negro at close range still regard him as but little more removed from the position in society he occupied while a slave.

The link to the article below contains a clue as to why Brown left New York and returned to his parents in Oklahoma – his interest was expanding beyond landscape painting to watching people: “In West Virginia he only loved landscape.  Now he watched faces, saw the bright girls as they went to high school, their books under their arms, interested, alert.  Saw them deteriorate, their ambition lost as they saw no chance for advancement.   He watched the great procession of Harlem and wanted to be able someday to paint it.”   According to the article below, he appears to have been unable to make a living as an artist, “like many black artists in that time”.    So this severe set-back and realisation that he might not be able to make a living as an artist in New York, may also have led to his return to the parental home.  

revisiting the art, life and influence of richard lonsdale brown

“Tragically, while staying with his parents in Oklahoma, he appears to have caught pneumonia (despite his young age), from which he died in 1917.   Du Bois, writing of Brown in editorials after the young man’s death, writes of his frustration at the loss of Brown’s talent, and appears to have blamed this on people not being willing to financially support the creativity of the artists in their midst.  Du Bois in 1922 writing in The Crisis: ‘There is a deep feeling among many people and particularly among colored people that Art should not be paid for.   The feeling is based on….a dream that the artist rises and should rise above paltry considerations of dollars and food’.

“In the case of Blind Tom, I was struck by the way that his superb gift for music shone through.   Although he appears to have had no formal musical education (a German musician in Columbus giving his opinion that Tom didn’t need any teaching as he would ‘work it all out by himself’!), he could identify every note when a number of chords were struck simultaneously, and he learned to play music on his master’s piano after listening to others perform those pieces.     Listening to the rain running down a gutter, and claiming inspiration from ‘what the wind said to me’ or ‘what the birds said to me’, shows how his sense of music encompassed the sounds of nature, as much as the more formal concept of instrumental music and song.   The Wikipedia article on Blind Tom Wiggins adds a rather bitter taste, explaining how Tom’s master, the lawyer Bethune, made a great deal of money out of Tom, touring him extensively and making him perform for up to four times a day.    The concert promoter to whom Bethune hired out Tom apparently marketed Tom as a ‘Barnum-style freak’, and frequently compared him to a bear, baboon or mastiff.   Very sadly, Blind Tom would usually introduce himself onstage in the third person, repeating what his managers had said about him (e.g. that he was non compos mentis) without any apparent understanding of how derogatory such a label was.  

“I have much more to read of this book, but I wanted to let you know how interesting I’m finding it.”

Black Atlantic Crossings: The Lives and Anti-Racist Tactics of Booker T. Washington and Manuel R. Querino

/ Sabrina Gledhill, PhD / Leave a comment

Black Atlantic Crossings by Sabrina Gledhill examines the lives and anti-racist tactics of Booker T. Washington and Manuel R. Querino, two influential figures in the Black Atlantic world whose contributions have often been overlooked or belittled. Challenging this historical erasure, the book argues that these figures were not merely products of their respective national contexts (the United States and Brazil) but rather transatlantic intellectuals who navigated and challenged the racialised boundaries of their time. It emphasises the interconnectedness of Black experiences and intellectual movements across the Atlantic, highlighting how Washington and Querino, despite their geographical distance, shared common concerns and engaged in vital transnational dialogues. Furthermore, it analyses the strategies and tactics they employed to combat racism and promote social justice within their societies, including their engagement with education, politics, and cultural production, ultimately offering a crucial rethinking of their lives, work, and enduring impact beyond narrow nationalistic frameworks.

The latest addition to Funmilayo’s Unsung Heroes series, Black Atlantic Crossings is now available in full-colour and black-and-white editions. You can find it on all major online booksellers, including Amazon and Waterstones.

Praise for Black Atlantic Crossings
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

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

Podcast Querino Project celebrates Black protagonism in Brazilian history

/ Sabrina Gledhill, PhD / Leave a comment

More than 40 professionals, mostly Black journalists, worked for over two years and eight months to produce the Querino Project, a series of podcasts and text feature stories that offer an Afro-centric look at history to explain Brazil today. The eight episodes are on air and have already been downloaded 810,000 times as of Oct. 28, 2022. The podcast has reached first place in both Spotify and Apple’s daily rankings of the most listened-to podcasts in Brazil.

“Querino has no journalistic scoop. No information is being revealed for the first time. Researchers have been publishing for a long time, some more recently. The big impact is one of novelty [to a wider audience]. We are learning things. Things that I, Tiago, even working from this viewpoint since 2018, didn’t know,” journalist Tiago Rogero, the creator of the project, told LatAm Journalism Review (LJR).

This is the third venture of Rogero, 34, into the world of non-fiction podcasts focusing on Afro-Brazilian culture and characters. In 2019 he produced Negra Voz, for O Globo newspaper, which won him the Vladimir Herzog Prize for Journalism and Human Rights in 2020. Then, he produced 30 episodes of Vidas Negras for Spotify.

One of the inspirations for Project Querino is the New York Times’ Project 1619, which similarly places the consequences of slavery in the United States at the center of the national narrative. Project 1619 refers to the year that the first slave ship landed in the United States bringing enslaved Africans. The event occurred one year before the celebrated arrival of the Mayflower ship with European settlers, which has a privileged place in American historiography.

“Every American child learns about the Mayflower, but virtually no American child learned about the White Lion [the ship that brought the first enslaved Africans to the country],” journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, editor in charge of Project 1619, told NPR. “Blacks are largely treated as an asterisk in American history.”

Similarly, the Querino Project presents Black historical characters who are little known in classrooms. The name Querino is a tribute to one of them, the intellectual Manuel Querino, a Black man born free in 1851 in Bahia, in a Brazil that was still a slave country. Brazil abolished slavery completely only in 1888, and was the last country in the Americas to do so.

Querino distinguished himself as a journalist, teacher, artist, and politician. He published in 1918 the book O colono preto como fator da civilização brasileira [The Black settler as a factor in Brazilian civilization], a social sciences’ pioneering text which placed Afro-Brazilians in a protagonist role in the building of the nation. Before starting the research for the Querino Project, Rogero himself did not know who the Brazilian intellectual Manuel Querino was.

“He is the exception of the exception of the exception because he was a Black child who had the chance to study. Because of this he became a geometric drawing teacher, an artist, researcher, journalist, union leader. He has an incredible intellectual production that positions Afro-Brazilians as protagonists in the process of nation building, and not just as a mere accessory, which is what the official version of history at that time already did,” Rogero said.

Manuel Querino is introduced to the audience only in episode four of the podcast, O Colono Preto [The Black settler], in which Rogero delves into the roots of educational disparity in Brazil today, showing how access to public education was consistently denied even to free Blacks living in Brazil. At the same time, he connects the fact with how late the country implemented affirmative-action policies, only in the early 2000s, and how they are still a reason for division in society today.

Besides Querino, the project introduces the audience to figures such as Maria Felipe de Oliveira, a Black woman who played a decisive role in the battles of the war of independence at Bahia. Also, figures such as Father José Maurício Nunes Garcia, a musician and composer who conducted the mass that celebrated Brazil’s elevation from a colony to United Kingdom of Portugal.

What most surprised Rogero in his research work, however, was the observation that Brazil could have gotten rid of slavery long before 1888. In 1831, under pressure from England, Brazil prohibited the trafficking of enslaved people. The law, considered revolutionary for the time, guaranteed citizenship and freedom to people in slavery conditions brought to Brazil as of that date. But it was never complied with.

“There was a big national agreement to disregard this law until at least 1850, when a new law again prohibits human trafficking. The people who had entered since 1831, some 800,000, were supposed to be freed because their status was illegal. But a new big elite agreement kept them enslaved. When we get to 1888, abolition benefits mostly the descendants of those who arrived after 1831, and who, by law, should have been freed many years earlier,” Rogero said.

Historian Ynaê Lopes dos Santos, from the Fluminense Federal University, acted as a consultant for the Querino Project. She believes the significant audience numbers demonstrate a fundamental need to revisit Brazil’s history critically.

“One of the great accomplishments of Projeto Querino is making this critical perspective very accessible, as well as the stories that have been systematically silenced from the black population, showing that history is a field in dispute,” Lopes dos Santos told LJR. “In this sense, the Querino Project seems to be a fundamental tool for understanding Brazil today. A Brazil that is, without a doubt, a consequence of a set of options and political choices made by the Brazilian elite.”

Multiplatform

Unlike Project 1619, originally conceived for magazine format and later transformed into a podcast, the Querino Project had its genesis as a podcast and only later generated text and image content, with feature stories and photographs published in the magazine Piauí, notable for its in-depth journalism. In the magazine, the choice of the podcast format as a priority was to expand access to the content.

“A podcast is free. Anyone with any cell phone can listen, they can listen to Querino. In addition, spoken media speaks directly to our ancestry and the orality of Afro-descendant people, which is very beautiful,” Rogero said. “When we do the podcast, it can be the hardest journalistic subject possible, but we have to make it like storytelling.”

The Querino Project was funded by the Ibirapitanga Institute, through a grant of R$626,808.51 (equivalent to USD 125,361.70). This amount covered the work of more than two years of a team of 40 people during the research and production of the podcast, and also the dissemination.

Like 1619, the Querino Project will also become a book, and there are conversations with video production companies for an audiovisual format adaptation. Rogero is also working to adapt the content for educational purposes, as he has heard from history teachers who are already using the podcast in their classrooms.

“Querino will continue for the next few years and our big focus is how to get this content into schools, especially public schools. Many teachers are already using the podcast in the classroom, although the language is not ideal. It’s a big concern of mine to make this content reach young people of school age,” Rogero said. “Querino can’t account for everything, but it’s our contribution, so that a more complete and complex version of the story can be known.”

Manuel Querino: Activism and Education for Freed-persons

/ Sabrina Gledhill, PhD / Leave a comment

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.

The Roots of Black Dandies and Fashion at the Met Gala

/ Sabrina Gledhill, PhD / Leave a comment

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

Fighting Historical Erasure, One Book at a Time

/ Sabrina Gledhill, PhD / Leave a comment

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

/ Sabrina Gledhill, PhD / Leave a comment

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.