FIGHTING TO BRING HISTORY TO LIGHT
Cemetery caretaker urges officials in Sugar Land to respect newly found graves, recognize inmates
The 31 marked graves inside Old Imperial Farm Cemetery are rusted and crumbling, markers of a time that Reginald Moore believes Sugar Land hopes to forget.
The 58-year-old has spent nearly two decades telling anyone who will listen about the old cemetery in Fort Bend County and how nearby areas may contain the graves of people who were part of the convict leasing system in Sugar Land. The statewide program, initiated shortly after slavery was outlawed more than 150 years ago, allowed prisoners, primarily African-Americans, to be contracted out for labor.
He relentlessly pushed city and school officials to study the open area near the cemetery and urged them not to build nearby. He watched anxiously as Fort Bend ISD began construction last year on a technical center within a mile and pleaded with them to conduct an archaeological survey first.
Now, city and school officials seem to be lis-
tening. Fort Bend ISD Superintendent Charles Dupre notified Moore this month that some 22 graves have been found on the construction site. Since the phone call, a school district official said, they’ve turned up more graves at the work site, thought to be 100 to 200 years old.
“It’s indisputable,” said Moore, who serves as guardian of the Old Imperial Farm Cemetery. “They’ve been trying to hide this history for years and now we can finally hold them accountable for the atrocities that happened that they didn’t want to be exposed.”
The school district is building its James Reese Career and Technical Center at University Boulevard and Chatham to offer advanced junior- and seniorlevel courses. Construction was halted on part of the site where the remains were found, but will continue in other areas.
The gated cemetery, which includes the 31 marked graves for guards and prisoners, sits on land that was once part of the Imperial State Prison Farm. But Moore believes it’s just part of a larger graveyard that includes the remains of those who were part of the convict leasing system.
“These people were used, abused, neglected and taken advantage of without any recognition,” said Moore. “I feel like it was an atrocity and somebody had to speak up for them.”
The role of race
Moore discusses the history with passion as he stands inside the chain-link fence of the cemetery, talking fast and running words together. Purple and yellow flowers sprout out from the ground around the aged cemetery tombs.
Many of the people buried here were men in their 20s and 30s, with dates of death ranging from 1912 to 1943.
Wearing a Martin Luther King Jr. shirt and a blue Department of Corrections hat, he recalls how he became intrigued with the history when he served as a correctional officer for three years in the mid-1980s at Jester I and III Units, located in unincorporated Fort Bend County.
Before he discovered the cemetery off U.S. 90, he immersed himself in city history, reading about how shortly after slavery ended, Sugar Land plantation owners Littleberry Ambrose Ellis and Edward H. Cunningham in 1878 leased out convicts for labor through the state of Texas.
The state would eventually gain control over the inmates five years later. However, Ellis and Cunningham were profitable in the convict-leasing business and oversaw roughly 1,000 convicts, most of whom were African-American, according to Caleb McDaniel, an associate professor of history at Rice University.
“Even though the system changed, the people remained the same. Cunningham and Ellis were former Confederates, slaveholders,” said McDaniel. “So the same people are looking for ways to exploit black labor in the aftermath of slavery.”
Moore, a Houston native and an alum of Jack Yates High School in Third Ward, also learned about the more than 5,200 acres that Texas purchased in 1908. The Imperial State Prison Farm was built here and more than 400 inmates were housed on the property, according to a historical marker that sits in front of the cemetery.
“This was still a very racially stratified system, where black convicts were doing the same kind of work (that) enslaved people had done,” said McDaniel. “African-Americans were also over-represented in the harshest kinds of convict labor outside the walls of the penitentiary, whereas white convicts more often worked inside the walls.”
‘History in the making’
Crews discovered human remains on the construction site about a month ago, but the school district did not learn it was a historic cemetery until the first week in April, according to district spokeswoman Amanda Bubela.
However, Moore had a feeling for years that the area near the cemetery could contain other remains. The cemetery he oversees mostly contains white men, so he suspected African-American prisoners were buried elsewhere. He fought with Sugar Land city officials about developing in the area, which was formerly plantation land, and urged them not to go through with the plans.
When he learned that the school district was building a technical center, he asked that 1 to 2 acres be set aside for a memorial to educate others about the convict-leasing system in Sugar Land.
Jay Jenkins of the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition has helped Moore push for a memorial at the technical center. He attended the meeting that Moore had with the superintendent last year and wrote a letter following up on his behalf. Jenkins and Moore said they still are unsure whether the school district will allow the memorial.
“Reggie was looked at by members of the school district, it seemed like, as a nuisance, and all he’s been trying to do is get recognition for those bodies that are buried in the ground,” Jenkins said.
School district officials said they’ve had an archaeologist on the construction site from the beginning, according to a statement issued Friday. Leah Brown, a spokeswoman for the Texas Historical Commission, said the school district will expand its search to the remaining construction site area.
“It’s definitely a once-in-a-career experience that we’re living right now,” Dupre said. “It’s history in the making. I know the historical commission, the archaeologists that have been working with us are so eager to get all of these bodies exhumed and to be able to really study these people and put it all into the context of our city and county’s history.”
For now, the history of the bodies remains a mystery. Brown of the Texas Historical Commission said it will take time to determine how long the bodies have been there “depending on the condition of the remains and the site itself.”
“There are a variety of ways archaeologists can study human remains to pinpoint a time frame. Further examination will likely shed more light on who these people were and their stories,” she wrote in an email.
Moore is unsure whether the district will allow him to play a part in helping uncover the history he worked so hard to find, but he’s not giving up.
Said Moore: “I just don’t know how to quit.”
“These people were used, abused, neglected and taken advantage of without any recognition. I feel like it was an atrocity and somebody had to speak up for them.”
Reginald Moore