African American Popular and Scholarly Interest in Central and South America, 1960 to 2005 (Author Abstract‪)‬

Due largely to the failure of schemes to establish "Negro colonies" in Latin American counties in the late nineteenth century and opening decades of the twentieth century, anti-black immigration policies, and the disquieting reports of respected, widely read black journalists like Robert S. Abbott, George Schuyler, and Ollie Stewart who toured the region and exposed its racism and poverty, by the 1960s the myth of a multiracial Shangri La somewhere south of border had been replaced by a more realistic assessment of conditions there. In July 1965, Ebony magazine, by far the most widely read African American monthly publication, featured the first of a lengthy two part series titled "Does Amalgamation Work in Brazil?" by its international editor, Era Bell Thompson, who spent two months in that country (part I, 27-41; part II, 33-42). Writing during the height of the civil rights movement in the U.S., she could not resist making comparisons and summed up her impressions of Brazil's finely delineated pigmentocracy thusly: Thompson praised Brazilians for their "non-violent" nature, for having "abolished slavery without conflict" (part II, p. 42), for outlawing capital punishment and bullfighting; and she seemed genuinely flattered that the Brazilians she interviewed were sympathetic to the cause of racial equality in the U.S. in general and in particular their high regard for Martin Luther King Jr. who along with a contingent of black clerics had attended the Baptist World Alliance in Rio de Janeiro in June 1960.