Grave discovery unearths legacy of black convict labor
‘Sugar Land 95’ were worked into the ground
SUGAR LAND, Texas – Reginald Moore sank deep into silent prayer, an electric candle casting a glow on the countenance of Martin Luther King Jr. embossed on his black Tshirt.
Beside him on the steps of Sugar Land City Hall, 50 others paused in quiet reflection. Eyes closed. Heads bent. Flames flickering in their hands.
Moore shifted from side to side, as if communicating with a spirit. He silently mouthed an invocation. He lifted his hands to heaven.
His mind returned to the moment, a few months back, when he first saw the skeletal remains of 95 African-Americans discovered at a school construction site in Fort Bend County, about 20 miles southwest of Houston.
He thought of those souls in the unmarked graves, lying forgotten for decades in the soil where a convict lease camp once stood. He thought of the free men, women and children ensnared by a system often called “slavery by another name.” How they toiled and sweated and bore the brunt of the lash until they dropped in their tracks and were buried where they fell.
He remembered the parable of the Valley of the Dry Bones from the Book of Ezekiel.
In the story, the prophet sees a vision of dry bones that are transformed into human figures – covered by flesh and sinew and skin, resuscitated with the breath of life and raised out of captivity.
Moore faced the crowd gathered for an evening vigil in honor of the “Sugar Land 95.” They were there, a previous speaker said, to be the “voices of those ancestors who had been unearthed.”
That call – to give voice to those who have long gone unheard – is being echoed not just in Sugar Land but around the country where longhidden gravesites of slaves, former slaves and free blacks have been uncovered in recent years – in a small park in New York City, on a plantation in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, on the campus of the University of Georgia, under a playground in Philadelphia.
Each find illuminates a part of the
American story that often goes untold and unmemorialized – and comes amid a national reckoning, a movement to bring attention to those missing chapters.
At the vigil, Moore took the microphone for a benediction.
“Lord of our weary years, Lord of our silent tears, we have come a long, long way, but we have a mighty long way to go,” he intoned. “Thank you for allowing those bones to be found, so that they may tell the truth of what happened in the past.”
The first bone
The first bone was found in February by a backhoe operator clawing through the dirt on land owned by the Fort Bend Independent School District. By the summer, the remains of 95 people had been recovered on the future site of a career and technical education center.
They were African-American. As young as 14 and as old as 70. With muscular builds but malnourished, their bones misshapen from backbreaking, repetitive labor. Buried in plain pine boxes, sometime from 1878 to 1911.
Archaeological experts hired by the school district retrieved chains but no markers. No names.
For two decades, Moore, an activist, historian and former prison guard, had told officials that the ground held the bodies of people who died while in the convict leasing system. Preliminary analysis supported that conclusion.
As the caretaker of the nearby Old Imperial Farm Cemetery, which holds the marked graves of 33 former state prisoners, Moore researched the history of the city that wears its identity as a sugar town proudly. Sugar Land was named for the Imperial Sugar Co., which is still based here, and the city seal bears the company’s crown logo.
Moore learned that much of Sugar Land, a sprawling, affluent suburb, had been home to plantations where sugar cane was harvested and boiled. After the Civil War, land was sold to two Confederate veterans, Edward H. Cunningham and Littleberry A. Ellis, business partners who turned to convict leasing for cheap labor. Prison labor contracts often specified “Negro workers.”
Moore advised school officials not to build on the property, begged them to do archaeological surveys before starting construction.
For years, no one in Sugar Land wanted to address that part of the town’s legacy.
Until the remains were found on the school construction site, once known as “Ellis Camp No. 1.”
Suddenly, a light shone not just on Sugar Land but on a little-talked-about chapter of U.S. history.
“The discovery and unearthing of these human remains provides a moment of reckoning for us to grapple with America’s history,” said Paul Gardullo, director of the Center for the Study of Global Slavery at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.
This is, Gardullo said, “a moment for us to take stock of the stories that ought to be told in public spaces like museums, in our towns and communities and in our schools.”
At the candlelight vigil in mid-December, Naomi Carrier, executive director of the Convict Leasing and Labor Project, described the cruelty of the system by quoting historian W.E.B. Dubois: “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”
Under convict leasing, which flourished across Southern states after the Civil War and into the early part of the 20th century, state governments leased out convicts as forced labor, exploiting a clause in the 13th Amendment that outlawed slavery except as punishment for a crime.
The vast majority of convict laborers were black, some former slaves, arrested under laws designed to “criminalize common dimensions of African-American life,” said Douglas Blackmon, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Slavery by Another Name.”
The “pig laws,” which formed the basis for Jim Crow-era segregation laws, included minor offenses such as stealing a farm animal, vagrancy violations, selling produce after dark, speaking loudly in the company of a woman, walking along the railroad tracks and not being able to produce proof of employment.
For petty crimes and trumped-up charges, African-Americans were sent by the thousands to prison camps, where they worked in brutal conditions from dawn to dusk.
In Alabama mines, prisoners were forced to dig 8 tons of coal a day. In a Georgia brick factory, they turned red clay into scores of hot rectangles. In Texas, they built the state Capitol building in Austin, part of the Texas State Railroad and the Fort Bend County Courthouse.
In Sugar Land, many were sent to sugar plantations, where conditions were so horrific the region was called the “Hell Hole on the Brazos.” Prisoners were worked so hard, their muscles were wrenched from the bone. They suffered regular beatings, infections from chains that cut into flesh, mosquito-borne illnesses.
Some Texas inmates sought to escape being sent to prison camps by “slicing their heel strings, hacking off their hands, or gouging out their eyes,” according to accounts in Blackmon’s book. One prisoner said he lost “the prime of my life … as a slave.” Another said he had been “buried alive … dead to the world.”
From 1866 to 1912, about 3,500 prisoners died in Texas, including those buried in the field in Sugar Land.
Moore, a devout Christian, had long heard their voices calling. He thought of Luke 4:18, his favorite Bible verse, as his mission statement.
“The spirit of the Lord is upon me,” Moore recited. “He has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor, heal the brokenhearted, restore sight to the blind and set the captives free.”
Until the “Sugar Land 95” are given a proper memorial and burial, he said, “those people are still in bondage.”
Where will they rest?
For the time being, the remains are stored in a blue storage pod on the school construction site by the rising frame of a new 200,000-square-foot vocational school.
The Fort Bend school district wants to relocate the remains to the Old Impe- rial Farm Cemetery, about a half-mile away. Moore said they do not belong at that graveyard, which is enclosed by a chain-link fence, holds mostly white prisoners who died after convict leasing ended, and is prone to flooding.
A task force, set up to recommend what to do with the remains, agreed – voting 19-1 to bury the “Sugar Land 95” on the land where they were discovered.
The school district filed a petition seeking permission to move the remains, but District Court Judge James Shoemake is not likely to make a decision until March. He appointed attorney Michael Elliott as a mediator to work toward a resolution.
The district contends that a school site is not the appropriate setting for a graveyard and memorial. The task force and community members, including Moore, say it is disrespectful to move the remains.
At the heart of the debate are questions raised across the country as Confederate statues are taken down and museums dedicated to telling the stories of African-Americans open: Whose stories are being told? Whose past is being honored?
Discoveries such as the one in Sugar Land can help tell a more complete American history, one that includes the “hidden stories of African-Americans,” said Brent Leggs, director of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund.
“When we create an American landscape that speaks truthfully about who we are as a nation,” Leggs said, “I believe we can change the way our nation thinks and the way that we relate to one another.”
More than 220 historians signed onto a letter, circulated by historian Caleb McDaniel of Rice University in Houston, urging Fort Bend officials “to make choices that acknowledge the national significance of this discovery.”
In Sugar Land, officials have the names of about 20 inmates who may have died at the camp on the construction site, but only one body, thought to be of an amputee prisoner, has been tentatively identified, according to a court filing.
The school district said it can’t conduct DNA testing without the approval of the Texas Historical Commission; the commission said it doesn’t have the authority to order invasive testing. The state Attorney General’s office was asked to weigh in.
For those advocating for the “Sugar Land 95,” the remains represent a tie to ancestors who never received justice in life, who deserve to have their names remembered, their struggles commemorated.
That is still missing in Sugar Land, Moore said. On a drive around the suburb, he pointed to streets and subdivisions named after plantations. He gestured to the water tower bearing the Imperial Sugar symbol, noted that the Sugar Land Heritage Foundation sells a 2018 Christmas ornament paying tribute to plantation owner Littleberry Ellis.
He flashed back, once more, to the moment he first saw the remains from the former Ellis Camp No. 1.
After so many years of researching the stories of African-Americans forced to labor in convict leasing, so many years of being “the lone voice in the wilderness,” he could bear witness to an undeniable truth: “They existed.”
He won’t let that again be forgotten.