4/1/2020 Bones that revealed a Texas town's forgotten racial past deserve respect | Opinion | The Guardian

Bones that revealed a Texas town's forgotten racial past deserve respect Morgan Jerkins Last year workers in Sugar Land found remains believed to be black convict laborers. Now activists aim to give these men and women a final resting place

Supported by

About this content Thu 7 Mar 2019 02.00 EST

am driving down Highway 90 to Richmond, Texas, to a meeting of the utmost importance, the latest in a series of events that began in March of last year. In that month, workers found human bones in decaying caskets beneath a construction site in the Texan town of Sugar Land, where the Fort Bend independent school district (FBISD) was building a career and https://wwwI .theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/07/sugar-land-imperial-prison-farm-cemetery-prisoners-remains 1/4 4/1/2020 Bones that revealed a Texas town's forgotten racial past deserve respect | Opinion | The Guardian I technical center. In June, Associate Judge John Hawkins ordered that the remains be exhumed; a team of archaeologists carried out the demands over a four-month period, concluding that the bones belonged to 94 men and one woman. A Fort Bend district judge ruled to halt the progression of the James Reese Career and Technical Center in November. But a question, and a conflict, remained: would the bones, now unearthed, be reinterred where they were found, or moved elsewhere?

Despite the judge’s ruling, district attorneys returned to court a month later, this past December, to argue that construction should resume and to ask that the cemetery designation legally attributed to the property be removed. FBISD’s petition also asked for court approval to rebury the remains at the Imperial Prison Farm cemetery, less than a mile from the technical center construction site. The James Reese Career and Technical Center began as a $58m initiative that was part of the school district’s 2014 bond program, and was scheduled to open this year. But the discovery of the remains stalled the center’s Wing E, and for each month that it has not been completed, it has been costing the county millions in “unbudgeted costs”. When I arrived in early February, the figure stood at around $18m.

I am headed from Sugar Land to a Fort Bend county historical commission meeting. There, the historical commission will decide whether or not to intervene in the ongoing lawsuit regarding how these 95 persons, believed to be black prisoners in the convict leasing system that laid the groundwork for the county’s affluence, should be memorialized. Highway 90 is lined with columns marked with an emblem: a crown within a star. The symbol honors Imperial Sugar, the oldest extant business in Texas, whose practice of convict leasing was a new, yet familiar, form of oppression for African Americans post-emancipation.

During slavery, cotton was king in many southern states. In the lower half of Texas, though, between the Brazos and Colorado rivers, in the counties of Brazoria, Fort Bend, Matagorda and Wharton, where the fertile black soil was abundant, sugar was the most lucrative crop. In one year, the aforementioned four counties produced more than 11,000 hogsheads of sugar. But the abolition of slavery sent the entire Texan economy into a downward spiral. Now that slaves could not provide free labor, contractors had to resort to other methods: the convict labor leasing system. The 13th amendment of the constitution states: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Punishment for a crime, in other words, became the entry point to another form of brutality. Black people could be sentenced to years-long imprisonment in a labor camp for offenses such as stealing a pig or looking a white woman in the eye. Edward H Cunningham and Littleberry A Ellis, business partners who served in the civil war on the Confederate side, became the biggest players in the convict leasing system when they signed a contract in 1878 to lease Texas’s entire prison population. After the war, Cunningham bought Sugar Land Plantation – formerly known as Oakland Plantation – which, at 12,500 acres, was one of the largest in Texas. In 1908, Sugar Land Plantation changed hands, and its new owners, Isaac H Kempner and William T Eldridge, created the Imperial Sugar Company.

The conditions in these labor camps were horrific. Prisoners were often stuffed into cells so narrow and cramped that many were smothered to death. The beatings were frequent, the mosquito-borne epidemics were rampant, and the annual mortality rate stood at an astounding 3%. When a prisoner died, they were not dignified with a homegoing and burial service. Oftentimes, a hole was dug and the corpse was placed in that spot. For almost a century these https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/07/sugar-land-imperial-prison-farm-cemetery-prisoners-remains 2/4 4/1/2020 Bones that revealed a Texas town's forgotten racial past deserve respect | Opinion | The Guardian laborers’ stories were forgotten, as new residential developments, campuses, and multimillion- dollar centers were built on the same land. In Sugar Land, it’s said that if you listen closely, you can still hear the chains of the prisoners who toiled in the sugarcane fields rattling. The bones that were found at the school district’s construction site almost certainly belonged to some of those prisoners.

Reginald Moore, guardian of the Old Imperial Farm cemetery, told me he warned Fort Bend county officials that the bodies of former slaves and convict laborers might be in their midst back in 2003. Regardless, no archaeological explorations were undertaken. Moore had been studying the history of the convict labor and leasing system for close to 20 years and suspected that the prisoners’ remains weren’t too far from the plantation sites, which had been converted into prisons. In 2018, Moore founded the Convict Labor and Leasing Project – which came out of his Texas Slave Descendants Society – to ensure that these prisoners would be properly acknowledged and that Texas would face a reckoning for its re-enslavement of African Americans. He was one of the first to see the bones, once the discovery was made: “I was elated. I’m an ordained minister. It reminded me of Ezekiel when the bones came to life. It was almost overwhelming. I felt the connection to these people who I’d been fighting for and I knew that they were there.”

The atmosphere in the commissioners court, when I arrive there, is tense. On one side sits Moore, members of his Convict Labor and Leasing Project and allies. On the other are officials and representatives for the school district. The proceedings begin with the testimonies of multiple community members, who argue that the bones should be interred where they were found. Michelle Morris, an attorney for FBISD, follows, maintaining that the school district had no previous knowledge of the remains, despite rumors to the contrary, and possesses title records that do not mention a cemetery. The city of Sugar Land did create a taskforce, of which Moore was a member, to determine how best to honor the deceased and restore harmony between officials and the community. But the taskforce was dissolved two months into its existence.

On an earlier phone call, Veronica Sopher, chief communications officer of FBISD, had told me: “We have always said that we’re going to memorialize this ground … inside the building, like a learning center. There might be a streaming video with a historical documentary about the finds. Some of the artifacts that we have – we’re going to display those, almost like on an interactive wall where any visitor can come into the building and see what we’ve found.” Sopher, like many of her cohorts, said she wanted to see a resolution reached, but not at the expense of the taxpayers. She had heard from activists who would like the center not to be opened at all, and responded: “That’s a philosophical cry from some passionate community members, but I would not say that that has been the sentiment from our local taxpayers who have authorized us to tax them to build this school.” In Fort Bend county, more than 55% of the population is white and a little over 21% is black. In Sugar Land alone, only a little over 7% of the population is black, whereas more than 50% is white.

These concerns over taxpayers, public responsibility and historical memory with regards to African Americans are echoes – in Texas, and in America. Black labor, through slavery or the convict leasing system, has been an engine for this country for decades and a significant source of its wealth. And yet, often at the behest of white taxpayers and the institutions that serve them, it is typically not recognized, let alone commemorated. Activists like Moore are seeking to give a public voice to the enslaved and imprisoned – as well as to their descendants – that they didn’t have in life. They are trying to restore the humanity of these men and women and bring them https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/07/sugar-land-imperial-prison-farm-cemetery-prisoners-remains 3/4 4/1/2020 Bones that revealed a Texas town's forgotten racial past deserve respect | Opinion | The Guardian home to a final resting place. They are attempting to do nothing less than eradicate a cultural amnesia that is rampant in the United States.

The Fort Bend county historical commission leaves to a break room to deliberate, and in less than two hours a decision has been reached. The commission has unanimously agreed, 43-0, to recommend opposition to the removal of the cemetery designation and request authorization to intervene in the lawsuit filed by FBISD. Moore is exuberant. “It’s fabulous,” he says. “God is great. They did the right thing. They are giving respect to these bodies.”

A few weeks after I return home, I learn that the FBISD board of trustees has approved a motion to collaborate with Fort Bend county to memorialize the Sugar Land 95, whose bones are currently resting in storage boxes. During a legislative session on 18 February, state representative Ron Reynolds proposed three resolutions: to recognize the Convict Labor and Leasing Project for its steadfast efforts; to create an interim committee to study the legacy of the Texas convict leasing system; and to remove a Confederacy plaque at the capitol in Austin and replace it with a plaque that honors those who suffered under the convict leasing system. Decisions as to where and when the remains will be reburied and what will happen to Wing E of the James Reese Career and Technical Center have yet to be made. Meanwhile, Debra Blacklock-Sloan, a genealogist and researcher, is working steadfastly to uncover the names and stories of the 95, who will finally be recognized for their contributions to an affluent suburb, where they were hiding in plain sight.

Morgan Jerkins is the author of the New York Times bestseller This Will Be My Undoing. She has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times, Elle, Rolling Stone and the Atlantic, among many others. She’s a visiting assistant professor at Columbia University’s MFA nonfiction program and is based in Harlem Topics Texas Antiracism and America Inequality US prisons Race Slavery comment

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/07/sugar-land-imperial-prison-farm-cemetery-prisoners-remains 4/4