Serra Negra “freedom” resolution requires continued service

A Redempção used satire to ridicule fugitive catchers and describe free people being reduced to slavery. The issue challenged the everyday policing that could blur the boundary between enslaved and...

José do Patrocínio launched Cidade do Rio as a daily newspaper and a platform for abolitionist arguments. He chose 28 September, the anniversary of the Free Womb Law, as its first publication date....

In a petition dated 25 October 1887, the Clube Militar asked Princess Regent Isabel not to use the Army to pursue people escaping slavery. The request challenged the military’s role in enforcing...

A Redempção argued that mass escapes and the “cleansing” of plantations had led enslavers to abandon claims over enslaved people. The editorial treats collective flight as a force that made the...

An A Redempção article argued that flight should no longer be treated as a crime. The claim contested the legal and police framework that made an enslaved person’s self-liberation punishable while...

The newspaper published “O crime da Penha do Rio do Peixe,” reporting the murder of police delegate Joaquim Firmino de Araújo Lima, who had sheltered two people in an emancipation process and joined...

A Redempção returned to the killing of Joaquim Firmino in an article titled “Penha do Rio do Peixe.” Repeated coverage made the murder a public indictment of the slaveholding order and its allies....

On 10 March 1888, João Alfredo Correia de Oliveira formed a new imperial cabinet more willing to pursue the end of slavery. The cabinet change followed years of mass abolitionist mobilization,...

An editorial titled “Não se iludam os jornais” criticized proposals that would declare people free yet bind them to former owners’ labor. It described organized mass flight despite police blockades...

A later account cited in scholarship describes a major operation in Recife in which 119 enslaved people were embarked for escape toward the North. Their movement followed years of fugitives, free...