Grave truth
Unmarked graves in Sugar Land serve as a reminder of an ugly chapter in U.S. history.
It has been four months since dozens of unmarked graves — containing the skeletal remains of African-Americans as young as 14 and as old as 70 — were unearthed at a construction site in Sugar Land.
It’s been four months since the discovery shined a light on a shameful chapter of history in our own backyard . Four months for public officials to do the right thing and look for a way to honor, or at least recognize, the 95 souls buried in pinewood coffins on the land of the old Imperial State Prison Farm.
Where is the outcry? Where are the chorus of proposals for museums or monuments, the calls for some kind of reparation? Where is the apology to the thousands of African-Americans who, like those found on the grounds of a new Fort Bend ISD school, toiled under the searing Texas sun as part of a Jim Crow-era convict-leasing system that author Douglas Blackmon has called “slavery by another name”?
The convict-leasing system, which operated in the years following the Civil War to the early 1900s, exploited a clause in the Thirteenth Amendment that outlawed slavery except as punishment for a crime. Southern states seized on that phrase to target and arrest black men for petty crimes and trumped-up charges such as vagrancy and flirting with white women, and contract them out for hard labor.
They were free people, sold to the highest bidder and forced to work on plantations, railroads and mines long after the Civil War had ended. They chopped sugar cane in conditions so brutal that Sugar Land became known as the “Hellhole on the Brazos.” They rebuilt our state and much of the South, and died by the thousands in Texas without so much as a decent burial.
For more than a century, they were mostly forgotten — gone without mention in most history books, their stories and sacrifices buried like their bodies. It is time to rectify that. It is time to listen to people like Reginald Moore, a historian and prison reform advocate, who has been telling folks for nearly two decades that the bodies of black slaves and prisoners were buried in Sugar Land. Moore has served as unofficial caretaker of the Old Imperial Farm Cemetery, which is owned by the city of Sugar Land, and is the resting place for 31 former convicts and guards. He warned Fort Bend officials not to build on the vacant land nearby because he believed more graves would be found at the former sugar plantation later used as a staterun prison.
He was right. Now, city and state officials need to heed Moore’s other pleas. For years, he has lobbied them to acknowledge this part of Texas history, to issue an apology and create a memorial to those ensnared in convict-leasing.
The national attention sparked by the recent discovery has prompted some action. The Fort Bend school district says it’s a “teachable moment,” to be used in classrooms. City officials say they are talking with Moore about reinterring the remains and have had a “very preliminary discussion” about “memorialization.” The city also has a link on the history section of its website leading to a Rice University collection of historical research about convict-leasing — an archive amassed by Moore.
A good start, but not enough. We cannot keep turning a blind eye to the terrible legacy of slavery. We cannot pretend that human bondage ended with the Emancipation Proclamation or when Union soldiers arrived in Galveston two-and-a-half years later to let Texas slaves know the war had ended. The systematic control of black bodies continued long after.
In the words of writer James Baldwin: “The story of the Negro in America is the story of America. … It is not a very pretty story.”
The story will never change if we keep omitting the ugly parts. That’s where the lessons are. We must face the pain caused by bigotry. We must pay tribute to those whose freedom was snatched away to build our cities, farms and rails. A memorial is but a token to ask for untold sweat and sorrow.