One hundred years after the abolition of slavery in Brazil, the nation’s new federal constitution promised the descendants of fugitive slave communities the right to land in 1988. This belated promise was not a gift: The framers of the constitution were responding to pressure from black militants and black social movements, as argued here. Even so, the Brazilian government recognized land only for black rural communities that could prove they were former quilombos that runaway slaves had established. In the years following the enactment of Article 68, the quilombo clause was shaped to create a distinct ethnocultural identity for quilombo descendants rather than to promote land reform for black rural communities.