Plan OK’d for remains in Fort Bend

Fort Bend County commissioners have approved the principal terms of a proposed agreement to acquire part of a school construction site where the remains of 95 African Americans discovered last year will be memorialized.

Fort Bend ISD will pay the county $1 million to help fund the project. The district also announced that DNA testing will be performed on the remains, a step community leaders had long sought.

“We are thankful and appreciative of the action taken by county leaders this week,” said school board President Jason Burdine in a news release. “With this action, the board takes another step in fulfilling its commitment to honor and preserve these individuals, not just as 95 unmarked graves, but as 95 human beings whose stories deserve to be told.”

Fort Bend ISD trustees unanimously approved the agreement last month. The key terms state that the school district will convey an area of the cemetery to the county for re-internment of the bodies. The district will provide an additional 10 acres for a memorial park, according to the release.

Approval of the deal is an important step in an arduous process that began in April 2018, when the school district announced the discovery of human remains at the construction site

of the James Reese Career & Technical Center.

Experts would later determine the remains were those of participants in a convict leasing system, through which prisoners were contracted out to perform cheap labor across the state.

The agreement was made possible by the Legislature’s passage of a bill that authorized Fort Bend County to operate the cemetery. The Texas Health and Safety Code had limited ownership of cemeteries to counties with a population of 8,200 or fewer. Fort Bend has a population of more than 780,000.

Gov. Greg Abbott signed

the bill into law June 7.

The discovery of the remains received national attention and stirred controversy as community members pleaded with the school district to keep the remains at the site. The district initially proposed moving them.

Fort Bend ISD decided this year to negotiate with the county and canceled plans to build on the portion of the construction site where the remains were discovered.

Community activist Reginald Moore, who has been vocal about the remains receiving a proper memorial, said he hopes the bodies can be reinterred before the end of the year.