"Heir to the glorious traditions of struggle of the men and women of his race": workers, politics, class and race in Bahia in the post-World War II

Abstract

In the elections for the National Constituent Assembly, in December 1945, the port activist Juvenal Souto Júnior, candidate for the Communist Party of Brazil, was presented in the communist press as a “legitimate heir to the glorious traditions of struggle of the men and women of his race, the blacks of Bahia, who led or participated in the 1835 and subsequent movements against oppression and for the equal rights of colored workers”. Juvenal was the second most voted candidate on the caption communist, surpassed only by Carlos Marighella, the only communist deputy elected by Bahia. In the post-Estado Novo period, many of the workers who stood out in the Bahian trade union movement were black. Some of these black workers saw in the short period of PCB legality (1945-1947) an important window of participation in party and electoral politics. Recent studies have focused on the PCB's relationship with the racial issue and black participation in party and electoral politics. However, these surveys have privileged the perspective of political partie and black activism and conjunctural variables, not devoting the same attention to the experiences and trajectories of workers and black union activists who had an effective role in party militancy and in the electoral dispute in the post-New State. This article departs from the perspective that the relationship of these black workers with party and electoral politics was a two-way street, where the speeches, guidelines and deliberations of the political party and black movements could be appropriated and re-meaning from of their trajectories and personal and social experiences.