Colored Men, founded in Porto Alegre in 1943, which spread to many Brazilian states, focused on the professional, intellectual and political qualification of the black and on the struggle for recognition of human and social rights, at a time when the black movement had expressive political force at the national level. In the 1950s, Florestan Fernandes was impressed by the vigor and stability of several black entities and associations in the state, a phenomenon he said he was unaware of in other parts of Brazil. In 1958, Porto Alegre hosted the first National Congress of the Negro, with delegations from several states, organized by Valter Santos of the Floresta Aurora Beneficent Society. However, most initiatives were of no effect due to repression or lack of official support. The process gained new impetus, visibility, and political power when it began to receive academic attention in the 1970s. Although this production has helped overthrow historiographical myths of great influence in the past, prejudices at various levels are still strong and the state has an expressive number of reports of racism. Much of the difficulty in better understanding the participation of blacks in regional history stems from their own historiographic invisibility. Significant records about them until the mid-twentieth century are few, and the unraveling of this forgotten history has largely occurred through oral history preserved in African-descendant communities, a type of study that suffers with the absence of written documentation. According to Maria Angélica Zubaran, According to Rosane Rubert, it is typical in the African-Brazilian communities of Rio Grande do Sul the care for the preservation of memory, especially in the transmission of memories of the time of slavery, "the concern of their ancestors in transmitting to the generations that succeeded them the dramas of a collective experience that reduced them to the condition of non-humans," building narratives "from which emerges a historicity that was massively suppressed, systematically dishonored and ceaselessly denied." At the time when the academies started their activities in this field, the black movement was restructuring internationally, and it was no different in Rio Grande do Sul. In Porto Alegre, in the mid-1960s, some theater groups with important impact on the city's black political and cultural scene emerged. Soon after, Grupo Palmares was founded, which, according to Deivison de Campos, served as "a catalyst for the demands that belonged to the whole black community of Porto Alegre", destabilized by its