Luís Gonzaga Pinto da Gama[a] (21 June 1830 – 24 August 1882) was a Brazilian lawyer,[12] abolitionist, orator, journalist and writer,[3] and the Patron of the abolition of slavery in Brazil.

He judicially won his own freedom and began to work as a lawyer on behalf of the captives, and by the age of 29 he was already an established author and considered "the greatest abolitionist in Brazil".

[14] Although considered one of the exponents of romanticism [pt],[4] works such as Manuel Bandeira's "Apresentação da Poesia Brasileira" do not even mention his name.

[18] São Paulo, where Gama lived for forty-two years, was in the middle of the 19th century a still small provincial capital that, with the demand for coffee production from the 1870s on, saw the price of slaves reach a level that made their urban possession almost prohibitive.

[19][b] It had a population ten times smaller than that of the Court (Rio de Janeiro), and a very strong presence of legal culture because, since 1828, one of the only two law schools in the country had been established there, the Largo de São Francisco Law School,[c] which received students from all over the country, coming from all social strata – besides the children of the rural oligarchy, members of the intellectual elite that was being formed at the time (Gama defined it, then, as "Noah's Ark in a small way").

[26] In an autobiographical letter he sent in 1880 to Lúcio de Mendonça [pt], he describes his birth and early childhood thus: I was born in the city of S. Salvador, capital of the Bahia province, in a two-story house at Bângala Street, forming an internal angle, in the "Quebrada", on the right side from the Palma churchyard, in the Sant'Ana parish, on June 21, 1830, at 7 in the morning, and I was baptized, eight years later, in the main church of Sacramento, in the city of Itaparica.

[4]Lígia Ferreira, one of the researchers who has most studied Gama's life, points out that this information could not be verified, although she stresses that the sobrado where he was born still exists; the register of his baptism could not be found, and adds to this the fact that the omission of his father's name from his account casts doubt on his real identity.

[28] In 1847, Luís Gama had contact with a law student, Antônio Rodrigues do Prado Júnior, who stayed at his master's house and taught him the alphabet.

However, the students of the Faculty were against it, making it impossible for Luís Gama to enroll, so he began to study on his own, as attending classes as a listener[20] and became a "rábula", the name given to the individual who had enough legal knowledge to be a lawyer, even without a law degree.

[33] After acting in slave cases, Gama was dismissed from his position at the Secretariat of Police, in 1868, due to pressure from conservatives [pt] who were dissatisfied with the freedoms won by the rábula.

Gama defined his dismissal "for the good of the public service" as a consequence of the work he had been doing to free slaves who were in an illegal situation, in addition to denouncing the system's abuses, or, in his words the turmoil consisted in my being part of the Liberal Party; and, through the press and the ballot box, fighting for the victory of my and his [Lúcio de Mendonça, to whom he writes] ideas; and promoting lawsuits of free people criminally enslaved, and lawfully assisting, to the extent of my efforts, slave freedoms, because I detest captivity and all masters, especially kings.

[17] His only work, originally published in two editions (1859 and 1861), Primeiras Trovas Burlescas, placed him in the literary pantheon of Brazil only twelve years after he learned to read.

If you will, my friend, In your thought record Ornamented with fine phrases, Dictated by talent; Don't count on me That I am a penniless man: In pampering things I'm a real rat.

He began his journalistic career in São Paulo, together with cartoonist Angelo Agostini; both founded, in 1864, the first illustrated humorous newspaper in that city, called Diabo Coxo [pt] (Lame Devil),[39] which lasted from October 1864 until November 1865.

[46] Historian Bruno Rodrigues de Lima also found a manuscript that presents the idea that Gama had been responsible for the creation of a community library with 5 thousand titles, something that was attributed to the Loja América, and his manifestos published in the newspaper "Democracia" demonstrate his commitment to a project of a public and secular school at least 30 years before the first debates on this subject.

[49] Although he acted mainly in the defense of blacks accused of crimes, of those who fled or to seek their legal freedoms, he did not refuse to attend gracefully to the poor of any ethnicity, and there were cases in which he defended European immigrants injured by Brazilians.

[2] In one example, in the Letter to Ferreira de Menezes dated December 18, 1880, when defending 4 slaves considered "four Spartacus" by Gama, who had murdered the son of their master Valeriano José do Vale, and had been executed by 300 people while inside the prison by "...the knife, the stick, the hoe, the axe...", Gama said:[54] ...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.

[55][54]An equivalent sentence was published on August 19, 1882 as the subtitle of the article "To the slavocrats", written by Raul Pompeia, in the Abolitionist Center's newspaper "ÇA IRA": "Before the Law, the crime of homicide perpetrated by the slave in the person of the master is justifiable".

[58] In his political activities Gama was affiliated to Liberal Party and before the Republican Manifesto [pt] he had already exposed his ideas in the article "The American Brazil and the lands of Cruzeiro without king or slaves" published on December 2, 1869.

At four hours and five minutes, the procession arrived at Brás, where a band was waiting to accompany it, playing sad chords; at Ladeira do Carmo [pt], the Brotherhood of Nossa Senhora dos Remédios joined the burial; arriving at the "city", stores closed their doors and flags were flying at half-mast, while people crowded the streets where the burial was to take place; in the windows, families squeezed themselves to watch: all along the way, many mourned the loss.

At one point, the slave driver Martinho Prado Júnior [pt] carried on one side, and on the other, a haughty, "poor, ragged, barefooted black man", in Pompey's register.

[62] Gama's death and the engaged speech at his grave marked the end of this first phase of the abolitionist movement, markedly "legalistic" (constitution of funds for the acquisition of captives and their freedom, legal actions for liberation) and the beginning of the phase of effective actions to combat the slavers: led by Clímaco Barbosa, the campaign moved on to "de facto ways", where people took in runaway slaves, hiding them in their homes until they were sent to the Quilombo do Jabaquara, in Santos, and stimulating mass escape from the farms.

[citation needed] Between 1923 and 1926, in what may be considered the "second period of the black press" in the state of São Paulo, the newspaper Getulino appeared in the city of Campinas; in this city racism was stronger than in the state capital itself, and the publication was part of the movement for greater participation of blacks in society; its title was a "tribute to Luís Gama who had as one of his pseudonyms Getulino" and its influence would culminate in the creation of O Clarim da Alvorada, a newspaper in the São Paulo capital.

[4] In 2014, in the wake of the success of the movie 12 Years a Slave, writer Ana Maria Gonçalves, author of the novelized work about Gama's life Um Defeito de Cor (A Color Defect), prepared a script for a movie and also drawing the attention of Brazilian television – pointing out that very little is said about slavery compared to other historical facts, such as the holocaust during World War II.

This homage was proposed by Professor Silvio Almeida, President of Luiz Gama Institute, and nowadays Minister of Human Rights and Citizenship of Brazil.

The film, then in production, was temporarily titled Prisioneiro da Liberdade (Prisoner of Liberty), also would feature actors Caio Blat and Zezé Motta.

[81] 133 years after his death, on November 3, 2015, the Order of Attorneys of Brazil, São Paulo Section, granted him the title of "lawyer", since he was not trained and acted as a "provisioned" or abolitionist.

The tribute ceremony, entitled "Luiz Gama: Ideas and Legacy of the Abolitionist Leader", included two days of events at Mackenzie Presbyterian University, through debates and lectures.

[83] In March 2020, the workshop "Slavery, Freedom and Civil Law in the Brazilian Courts (1860–1888): How the Black Lawyer Luiz Gama Developed a Legal Doctrine that Freed Five Hundred Slaves" took place at Princeton University.

[84] Historian Bruno Rodrigues de Lima, from the Max Planck Institute,[85] spent nine years going through archives and registry offices looking for the complete works of Luís Gama, in a project for the publication of ten volumes and approximately 5,000 pages in Portuguese entitled Obras Completas [Complete Works (of Luiz Gama)], alongside the publisher Hedra.