Some scholars downplay quilombos as fragile while ignoring evidence of sustained resistance.

Evidence

A. J. R. Russell-Wood, “Black and Mulatto Brotherhoods in Colonial Brazil: A Study in Collective Behavior,” Hispanic American Historical Review 54, no. 4 (November 1974): 571. On pp. 573–74 in the same article, Russell-Wood asserts: “The presence of groups of runaway slaves (quilombos) and uprisings by blacks and mulattoes (infinitely rarer than the ‘running scared’ correspondence of governors and town councils would suggest) might be advanced as evidence of psychosocial cohesion among such people. In fact such alliances as there may have been proved temporary and too fragile to sustain challenge over a period of time.” This, and similar comments, as well as reviews of the bibliographic and reference materials for this article and his previous study (Fidalgos and Philanthropists, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1968), suggest that Russell-Wood has chosen to ignore or dismiss most of the studies of Blacks in Brazil that have focused on the quilombos. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1935

Categorization

• XREF: Model example of Robinson’s method: exposing the ideological bias in the historiography itself, a running thread of Part One.