[upbeat music] - [Announcer] The following program is from NET, the National Educational Television Network.

[fireworks boom] [performers chant] [rhythmic drumming] - Carnival in Brazil, three days and four nights of national frenzy.

It's origins?

Pagan and Christian.

The music and dance?

African.

In the fusion of white Europe with Black Africa, Carnival symbolizes Brazil's reputation as a racial paradise.

[melodic chanting] [rhythmic drumming] [cymbals clash] [rhythmic drumming] [melodic chanting] [rhythmic drumming] My name is Ossie Davis.

The experience of the Negro in Brazil and the rest of Latin America has been different than ours.

So different that where we are caught up in a struggle often is accompanied by racial strife.

Brazil has been described as a racial paradise.

What has been the experience of the 30 million Negroes in Brazil?

Has Brazil solved the crises that plague our country?

And can we learn something from Brazilians that can provide us with answers to our American dilemma?

In our "History of the Negro People" series, we came to Brazil to explore these questions.

Jorge Amado, perhaps the leading Brazilian novelist, told us: - [speaks foreign language] I believe that Brazil is a country where a process, which is perhaps unique in the world, is taking place.

It is a melting pot of peoples and races that is someday going to reach a point where you won't be able to talk anymore about pure white or pure Black.

Our experience differs fundamentally, not only from North America, but from all other countries.

It is unique because it is an experience of the mixing of races, the mixing of blood.

Here next to me is Maria DeAlves, a movie actress, a Brazilian mulatto beauty, who, herself, demonstrates the very positive results of the blending of the races and the reasons for the Brazilian experience lying in our past, our history.

[calm music] - [Ossie] Brazil in 1500 was a wild and primitive land of savage animals and the cannibalistic Indian, oldest inhabitant of the New World, predating both Portuguese and Negro by more than 1,000 years.

In 1500, a Portuguese ship blown off its course arrived in Brazil.

Colonists soon followed.

Many were adventurers and criminals.

[calm music] To most, this barbaric country was a place of exile.

The Portuguese came with no experience in farming and a distaste for work.

A renaissance humanist wrote, "If there are any people more given to laziness "than the Portuguese, "I do not know where it exists."

[calm music] Slavery seemed a convenient answer.

The Portuguese attacked and massacred the Indian and made him the first slave in the New World, [calm music] but the Indians failed to meet the rigid qualifications for slaves in the 16th century.

They died by the thousands.

[calm music] A Spanish friar, Bartolome de las Casas, gave up his land and slaves and returned to Spain, where he begged the Spanish regent for an end to the enslavement and slaughter of the Indians throughout Latin America.

[calm music] To save the Indians, las Casas suggested an alternative candidate: the hardier African Negro.

[calm music] In Africa, itself, slavery, both Black and white, was not new.

Arab traders and African priests had been buyers and sellers of slaves for thousands of years.

Now, the Portuguese took over.

For these Africans, the Muslims, the Bantus, and the Sudanese, the trip over was the beginning of a tragic future.

From 30 to 40 days, they crossed the South Atlantic.

These sailing clippers were known as coffins.

The slaves were kept in the hold from five in the afternoon until eight in the morning in darkness.

The loss of human cargo ran as high as 70%.

[calm music] When they arrived in Brazil, they were cataloged and sold.

[calm music] First, they were sent to the sugar plantation, for sugar was the unchallenged king of Brazil for many years.

Then gold was discovered, and the Negro worked in the gold mines of the New World.

[calm music] There was also a great demand for skilled artisans.

[calm music] Life was harsh.

Almost any offense committed would result in whippings with a twisted raw leather hide.

More serious crimes warranted more sophisticated punishment, such as fastening the slave for several days by his ankles or his arms.

[calm music] In 1607, a group of Negroes revolted, the first of many uprisings.

[calm music] But the Negro was more assimilated in colonial Brazil than in North America.

He was welcomed into the Catholic Church, where he was baptized and married, and the white colonist and Negro slave lived together intimately.

Black nannies brought up the children.

The Portuguese adapted African cooking, and the men who did not bring wives with them took on the Negro women as concubines, sometimes even married them.

On May 8th, 1888, the Chamber of Deputies drew up an abolition bill as most Brazilians began to realize that slavery was doomed.

Crowds gathered below as the debate raged inside.

On May 13th, the Princess regent banished slavery from Brazil as thousands of Brazilians roared their approval.

Emancipation took 23 years longer, but one war less than in North America.

Professor Marvin Harris is the chairman of the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University and an expert on race relations in Brazil.

- After 1888, there was no history in Brazil of the type of Jim Crow sharp racial struggle or race riots, lynchings, public discrimination, public transportation, and in schools.

Just nothing comparable to it.

The whole trajectory of experience in Brazil between the races has been a much milder sort of experience.

- [Ossie] Today, the majority of Brazilians, it is said, are the descendants of masters or slaves.

The casa-grande, or big house, still survives.

Inside the house, the descendants of a Portuguese master still gather for Sunday dinner.

The family's silver and crystal are almost the last vestiges of a more elegant past.

[guests murmur] [silverware clangs] Although the days of master and slave are gone, the children still enjoy some aspects of the old casa-grande life.

They ride their horses, as they have done for generations, through the fields of sugarcane where Negroes still work as their slaved ancestors did.

But now, for a salary of under $10 a week.

[sugarcane shuffles] [workers murmur] These Negroes, like the white family in the casa-grande, hold onto their old traditions, African traditions.

[acoustic jazz music] A few miles away is the city of Salvador, the first capital of Brazil, in the province of Bahia.

Salvador was the biggest port of entry of slaves from Africa in the Western Hemisphere.

[acoustic jazz music] Few people in this city can be sure they're not just a little Black.

More than 50% of the population is of mixed ancestry.

Many whites in Salvador would be classified as mulatto in the United States.

Brazilians called Bahia a velha mulata, "the old mulatto woman."

Dr. Gilberto Ferreira, former member of the National Assembly and former ambassador to the United Nations, is Brazil's greatest historian.

- The influence of the Negro in Brazilian life is a mess, both historical and at present, when the presence of the Negro is everywhere in Brazilian culture, in what is most characteristic in Brazilian culture.

You find that Brazilians now are even proud of the fact that they have a Brazilian cookery.

That's considered by some to be the rival cookery of the French one and of the Chinese one.

They are proud of the fact that this very characteristic, Brazilian cookery, has many traits of African influence.

In fact, if it were not for this great African influence, there would not be a Brazilian cookery.

[rhythmic strumming] - [Ossie] Capoeira, another African tradition.

Once a way of fighting between slaves with razors strapped to their ankles, has slowly changed until now.

It is a ritual dance accompanied by African instruments.

The dancers keep in time to the rhythm as they attack each other with hands, feet, and head, just stopping short of landing a blow.

But the greatest African influence is its people.

This woman is known simply as Olga.

She lives in the slums of Salvador.

Many of the people who live in these slums are of mixed blood, and some would even pass for white.

[distant voices chatter] Olga lives in this house.

She has eight children.

[Olga speaks foreign language] The oldest boy works for the federal government.

Laurel, who is 21, is an electrician and mechanic.

[family speaks foreign language] The other children pick up work wherever they can.

[family speaks foreign language] [girl laughs] But Olga is not simply a housewife.

She is the high priestess of the Candomble.

[rhythmic shaking] Candomble, practiced in Bahia, was originally an African fetish cult brought by slaves and altered by time, [melodic chanting] but still, essentially African.

- [speaks foreign language] People come to me because of sickness, because of setbacks, because of spiritual persecutions.

They come for many reasons and they kneel on the ground and try to feel that sense of personal exultation.

[shells shuffle] - [Ossie] As priestess, Olga has profound responsibilities as moral and spiritual leader.

At a consultation, this woman asks Olga to help her sick daughter.

Olga must divine the spirits' orders, and in the reading of her shells, she finds the prescription for this woman's troubles.

[rhythmic drumming] [melodic chanting] Olga and her followers, called daughters of the saints, are preparing for the traditional dance of the Candomble.

Roosters and chickens are sacrificed to the spirits, their blood rubbed against a holy tree.

[rooster squeals] [melodic chanting] [rhythmic drumming] Herbs are gathered and African songs are sung in the original African tongue, yoruba.

[melodic chanting] [rhythmic drumming] Special foods are prepared to offer the spirits.

[rhythmic drumming] [melodic chanting] It is the night of the Candomble, the climax of religious activity for Olga and her followers.

Many of the participants and spectators are white.

They find in Candomble a vitality lagging in their own church.

[rhythmic drumming] [melodic chanting] Olga's Candomble is matriarchal.

Men participate only as spectators and musicians.

Believers are assigned a special saint, similar to those worshiped in many parts of Africa.

[melodic chanting] [rhythmic drumming] In the music and dance, they hope that he will enter their bodies.

They yearn to be possessed.

[rhythmic drumming] At the time of possession, it is said the saint descends into the head and through the body, he dances and talks.

Then the daughter of the saint dances in a trance.

The possession is complete.

[rhythmic drumming] [melodic chanting] But if Olga is an African priestess, she is also a Catholic.

She sees no conflict between the Catholic Church and the worship of her African ancestors.

The saints of Candomble are fused with the saints of Catholicism.

[melodic chanting] - If African tradition is still strong in Brazil, it is also changing.

It is absorbing and being absorbed with the religion and tradition of Catholic Brazil.

Many of the people who attend its vivid ceremony come as spectators rather than converts, and the younger generation of Negroes is little interested in its values.

They are less concerned with their past as Africans and more with their future as Brazilians, and as Negroes.

Olga's son, Laurel, prefers soccer to the African capoeira.

[ball thuds] [players chatter] But though he works and plays with whites, he is fearful about the future.

[ball thuds] - [speaks foreign language] I have been handicapped by my color in many things.

In jobs, at parties, in many little ways that are hard to relate.

I would prefer that my wife would be lighter than I, because I would like to have lighter children.

If I marry lighter and have children who look more white, they will have more opportunity to get ahead in life.

I want the best for my children.

I don't want them to suffer the disappointments I did because of my color.

- [Ossie] Professor Thales de Azevedo is an anthropologist at the University of Bahia.

We ask him about racial discrimination in Brazil.

- You can very easily see that the Negroes have been retained in a very low position in our society, which is due to discrimination all through our history.

By the means of these devices, which I haven't mentioned formerly, the Negroes are not accepted in some schools, in some jobs.

We have practically no Negroes in the higher ranks of the Army, in the clergy.

At least, we have no bishop who is a Negro.

We have priests, but no bishops.

And in the private schools, sometimes they are not accepted.

At least, they are not accepted in the proportion that they exist in the population.

I think these are the means through which we discriminate against them.

They may rise individually, but not as a group.

- [speaks foreign language] The prejudice that exists in Brazil, as I said, is a discrimination of color.

So much so that people who are descended from Negroes but have lighter skin or in finer feature, pass for white.

Those with dark skin have more difficulty than those with lighter skin.

The Brazilian, in general, doesn't have a trace of prejudice.

He has color prejudice.

- Professor Harris, do Brazilian Negroes have the same emotional and psychological problems as American Negroes?

- My experience is that Brazilians are not troubled by the question of who they are racially to the extent that many Americans are.

The reason there, the explanation of that, I believe, is because Brazilians have a chance of changing their racial identity during their lifetimes.

- And how is this done?

- Well, one way to do it is to improve one's job.

Get a better job, get a better education, make some money.

As a matter of fact, there's a a saying, which is, which goes, "Money whitens."

- [Ossie] "Money whitens" in Brazil means that, if a Negro is wealthy enough and well educated, he can share the advantages of Brazil's upper class whites.

He is not even called a Negro.

There are no "Whites Only" signs anywhere, but Negroes are tacitly excluded from many places.

[calm music] Social segregation is the unwritten rule.

Yet, if "Money whitens," few Negroes have much money.

The favelas, or slums, do not discriminate.

The houses are built out of wood, cardboard, and scrap metal.

Of the thousands who live in these favelas, a large number are Negro.

The hillsides on which the slums have sprung up have no electricity, no sewers or paved roads.

Whatever enters the favela is carried in by hand and by foot.

Yet, the favela is not a ghetto.

People live here, not just because they are colored, but because they are poor.

It is possible for the Negro to educate himself and move out, and he can also marry out.

[soft guitar music] - My daughter is married to a white man, and she has no problem at all.

She's very light-skinned, you know, and there, of course, she has three children now, and they're almost white.

[laughs] - Yes, I have Negro blood through my father.

My greatest, my great-grandfather was a mulatto.

I looks like a white man.

Nobody ever said to me that I'm a mulatto or I'm not a white man.

And if I were a mulatto, perhaps, perhaps I should not care about that.

Why care?

- As you know, passing in the United States, it is a shame.

It's a technique unaccepted and rejected by both parties.

Both the white and Negroes, they reject the one who tries to pass.

While in Brazil, passing is a common thing.

- It's rare now to find a Negro of the pure dark type in Brazil.

It's possible to find, but it's very difficult because race mixture has been, miscegenation has been, in Brazil, as you know, a process of two of very much generalized, and the result of this, that the different intermediate types of race mixture are numerous in Brazil, and the survival of pure Negro types, very scarce, very rare.

- We, too, in the United States, have miscegenation.

One has but to take an objective view of the Negro in prominent positions in the leadership of the integration movement here in the United States to realize that many of these people are not, by Brazilian standards, Negro at all.

We have a system, however, of reckoning racial identity which does not tolerate any intermediate status.

Hence, we are faced here with a choice of being either Negro or white.

This is a biologically inappropriate and foolish type of categorization, at least from the point of view of genetics and anthropology.

I think it's quite reasonable to predict that, as, if things go on as they have been going on in Brazil for another century or so, we can expect that both whites and Negroes will disappear.

And my own feeling on this subject is, why not?

Because the resulting mixture will take its place among bonafide racial groups of the world, all the racial groups of the world that we know of are mixed groups.

There are no pure races.

- [speaks foreign language] The Negro from abroad cannot comprehend us.

He finds a Negro race which is intermixing with the white and a new race is emerging.

At first, he thinks this is a subtle form of prejudice because the Negro is disappearing.

But then, it would also be a subtle form of prejudice against the white because the white man, as such, is disappearing, also.

But even if the Negro vanishes eventually as a pure race in Brazil, his influence and his mark on us are deep.

We are convinced that we are taking the right path, and that racial democracy may really be Brazil's great contribution to a universal, humanistic culture.

[military chants] [triumphant band music] [upbeat music] - [Announcer] This is NET, the National Educational Television Network.