The historiography of Brazilian education, in its traditional line, spread the idea that Afro-Brazilians did not attend school until the nineteenth century. This study particularly aims to investigate the relationship between the Afro-Brazilian population and schooling, through the experience of the students from The Casa de São José. From the documentary analysis of this institution’s records, a place for professional training in Rio de Janeiro and created three months after Slavery Abolition, it was possible to verify pupils´ racial profile development in this institution, which, at the beginning, revealed a larger representation of Black over White students. Based on Mattos (2013) and Müller (2003), the whitewashing in the enrolments progress, after ten years of the institution’s foundation, was understood on the one hand as a distancing strategy of slavery stigma and, on the other hand, as whitewashing due to the creation of unannounced strategies that prevented the access of people who distanced themselves from the desired physical and cultural standards. Decolonial thoughts influenced the interpretation of these given universalist practices, having in mind the Eurocentric power pattern gradually built by colonizers and perpetuated even after decolonization, which was held as an attempt of cultural, historical, social, political and economic homogenization through the control structures using race as a basis of classification.