Luiz Gama

Luiz Gonzaga Pinto da Gama was born free in Salvador, Bahia, on the twenty-first of June 1830, the son of Luiza Mahin, a freed African woman of the Mina coast (of the Nagô nation, by his own account), and a Portuguese-descended father of a prominent Bahian family. His mother was remembered as proud and combative, refusing Christian baptism and named among the rebellions that shook early nineteenth-century Bahia.

Though born free, Gama was betrayed at the age of ten by his own father, who, ruined by gambling, sold the boy into slavery and led him aboard a ship bound south. He labored as a house servant for years in São Paulo. Only at seventeen, taught his letters by a lodging student, did he obtain proof of his rightful freedom and escape bondage in 1848.

Self-taught in the law, Gama rose to become the great "lawyer of the slaves." He wielded the Law of 7 November 1831 — which had outlawed the Atlantic trade — to argue that Africans brought after that date were illegally held, and through the courts he freed more than five hundred enslaved people, among them a single 1869 action liberating over two hundred at once. He was also a poet, journalist, republican, and freemason whose voice helped shake the foundations of the Empire.

Luiz Gama died in São Paulo on the twenty-fourth of August 1882, six years before abolition, mourned by thousands. He turned the master's own law against the whole machinery of bondage — and in doing so, honored every life he set free.