Luís Gama

Luís Gama circa 1880

Luís Gonzaga Pinto da Gama (Salvador, June 21, 1830 - São Paulo, August 24, 1882) was a Brazilian rábula (a self-taught lawyer), abolitionist, orator, journalist and writer, and the Patron of the Abolition of Slavery in Brazil.

Quotes

• The day of happiness will be the memorable day of the emancipation of the people, and the day of emancipation will be the one when the great are put down and the small raised up; when there are neither masters nor slaves; bosses nor subordinates; powerful nor weak; oppressors nor oppressed; but when the vast Brazil is called the common homeland of Brazilian citizens or United States of Brazil.
  • Correio Paulistano, January 29, 1867. Source: Defendeu escravizados: O inestimável legado do jornalista Luiz Gama.

• If someday (...) the respectable judges of Brazil, forgetful of the respect they owe the law, and of the indispensable duties they have contracted before morality and the nation, corrupted by venality or the deleterious action of power, abandoning the sacrosanct cause of law (...) failing in due justice to the unfortunate ones who suffer unjust slavery, I, on my own account, (...) and under my sole responsibility, will advise and promote, not insurrection, which is a crime, but "resistance", which is a civic virtue.
  • Correio Paulistano, November 10, 1871. Source: Defendeu escravizados: O inestimável legado do jornalista Luiz Gama.

• I am not a legal scholar, I am not a doctor, I am not a law graduate, I have no pretensions to celebrity, nor am I in the position to occupy a position in the judiciary; I am, however, disgusted by the notorious incongruity of which, with undauntled arrogance, eminent magistrates who have as their office the study of laws, and as their obligation the just application of them.
  • Correio Paulistano, March 12, 1874. Source: Defendeu escravizados: O inestimável legado do jornalista Luiz Gama.

• Slavery is a kind of social leprosy: it has often been abolished by legislators and restored by education under various aspects.
  • 1876. Source: Luiz Gama foi o 1º jornalista brasileiro negro, mas ainda é desconhecido.

• I am an abolitionist, without reservation; I am a citizen; I believe I have done my duty.
  • A Província de São Paulo, “Questão forense”, October 14, 1880. Source: Defendeu escravizados: O inestimável legado do jornalista Luiz Gama.

• There are scenes of such greatness, or of such misery, that being complete in their kind, they cannot be described; the world and the atom define themselves; thus, crime and virtue keep the same proportion; thus, the slave who kills the master, who fulfills an inevitable prescription of natural right, and the unworthy people, who murder heroes, will never be mixed.
  • A Província de São Paulo, Carta a Ferreira de Menezes, December 18, 1880. Source: Leia artigo de Luiz Gama publicado há mais de 140 anos nas páginas do Estadão.

• Wretched people; they ignore that it is more glorious to die free on a rope, or torn to pieces by dogs in the public square, than to feast with the Neros in slavery.
  • A Província de São Paulo, Carta a Ferreira de Menezes, December 18, 1880. Source: Leia artigo de Luiz Gama publicado há mais de 140 anos nas páginas do Estadão.

• A law is a social monument, a page of history, a lesson in ethnography, a reason for state.
  • Gazeta da Tarde, [Carta a Ferreira de Menezes], January 07, 1881. Source: Defendeu escravizados: O inestimável legado do jornalista Luiz Gama.

• In front of them Washington, pensive like Archimedes, with the tip of the sacred sword, soaked in the blood of battles, inscribes the United States on the map of the Nations; and Franklin, the modern Teramenes, snatching a ray from the sun, with lucid stars, engraves in infinity the eternal legend of Liberty.
  • À Forca o Cristo da Multidão, 1882. Source: Luiz Gama desenha o perfil de Tiradentes.

• At half past one o'clock, as today, 90 years ago, expired the man who, in this country, first proposed the liberation of the slaves, and the proclamation of the Republic. He was tried as a defendant of lese-majestie, he was killed, but Tiradentes dead, like the sun at sunset, shows himself to the universe as great as at its dawn.
  • À Forca o Cristo da Multidão, 1882. Source: Luiz Gama desenha o perfil de Tiradentes.

• Under the law, the crime of murder perpetrated by the slave on the person of the master is justifiable
  • Subtitle of the article "Aos escravocratas" written by Raul Pompeia. Newspaper "ÇA IRA", August 19, 1882. Source: Benedito, Mouzar (2011). Luiz Gama - o libertador de escravos e sua mãe libertária, Luíza Mahin 2 ed. São Paulo: Expressão Popular. Page: 59. ISBN 85-7743-004-9.

• The slave who kills his master, in any circumstance, always does so in self-defense.
  • Quote by Lúcio de Mendonça in an article about Luís Gama, but that many attributes it to Luís Gama. Source: Obra de Luiz Gama revela a luta por um Brasil sem reis ou escravos. Read more in The "Gama style" of judicial practice.

About Luís Gama

• Luiz Gama is the only intellectual, the only black Brazilian personality of the 19th century to have lived the experience of slavery. This is already a fact that makes him unique in the panorama of Brazil in the 19th century".
  • Historian Lígia Ferreira. Source: Obra de Luiz Gama revela a luta por um Brasil sem reis ou escravos.

• ...Luiz Gama was keen to demonstrate, through his example, the fallacy of the pseudoscientific beliefs in vogue in a slaveholding society convinced of the intellectual incapacity and moral inferiority of Africans and their descendants, the basis of the racist ideology that still persists among us.”
  • Historian Lígia Fonseca Ferreira. Source: Os desafios de Luiz Gama na luta dos negros por justiça.

• One hundred years before Martin Luther King, he said he had a sublime dream: the lands of the Cruzeiro, without kings and without slaves.
  • Historian Lígia Fonseca Ferreira. Source: Os desafios de Luiz Gama na luta dos negros por justiça.