From slavery to eligible citizenship: the trajectory of José Agostinho dos Reis in defense of science and popular education

Abstract

This article aims to reflect about the contributions of individuals who have been made invisible by traditional historiography but who played important roles in popular education and the Brazilian abolitionist process, through the José Agostinho dos Reis’s trajectory. During the last decades of the 19th century, education and abolition began to be debated and, by some, considered necessary for the modernization process of the Empire to achieve the goals of civility and progress. Enslaved men and women, as well as people who had left captivity and even become free, invested in education as a possibility for social transformation and combating existing prejudice. Born into slavery, José Agostinho dos Reis became an abolitionist, graduated in Engineering and was a professor at the Escola Politécnica, assuming its interim directorship and achieving prestige and social recognition. Thus, his experience allows us to perceive the complexities of the relations established between slavery and freedom, in addition to the role of education in this configuration.