In the first half of the 20th century, in São Paulo, there were associations dedicated to promote cultural and sport activities for the African American people. They emerged to denounce discriminatory practices and to promote ethnic sociability through athletics, boxing and, especially, soccer. One of them was the Black Press. In this article, the authors sought to understand the strategies of the Black Press to report the participation of black people in the emerging field of soccer. The contents of the Black Press, available in the National Library in the form of microfilms, were analyzed using the theoretical perspective of the Cultural History. The objective was to observe the continuity and regularity of the speech, the points of confrontation and symbolic dispute around the negotiation of the identity construction of "black" in the sport and identify, by means of the messages sent by those media outlets, the strategies of distinction used by the ethnic / racial group around the defense against negative representations or construction of positive representations of blacks in the emerging field of soccer. They concluded that the feeling of the racial consciousness, the need to integrate themselves with the nation and the desire for social mobility were the reasons that held the African Americans together through those associations. Thence, the "Black Press" tried to build a representation of black identity that emphasized the soccer resources, without forgetting moral matters as discipline, hygiene and order. The dissemination of the achievements of blacks in sports promoted a positive identity of black man in soccer, in accordance with the demands of that context: a sanitized and disciplined nation in accordance with the national project that understood soccer as a mean of positive expression of "Brazilianness".
Black Press; São Paulo; Soccer