Wrong lesson
With students back in school, Fort Bend ISD is breaking its promise on Sugar Land remains.
The Fort Bend Independent School District has turned a teachable moment into a bad lesson by backing out of a promise to contribute $1 million toward a memorial for the 95 convict laborers whose skeletal remains were found last year in unmarked graves where a new school is being built.
Just last month the district said it would convey to Fort Bend County part of the land where the James Reese Career and Technical Center is being built for reburial of the remains, provide an additional 10 acres for a memorial park, and “also pay the county $1 million that will go toward future costs associated with reinterment and memorialization.”
An announcement of the agreement with Fort Bend County is still posted on the FBISD website, but the district is acting as if the July 11 promise was meaningless. What kind of lesson is the district teaching its 76,000 students by suggesting it’s OK to make a deal and then blithely walk away from it?
It might be excusable if the district said it had miscalculated its resources and didn’t have $1 million for the project, but that was not what Superintendent Charles Dupre said in a video he posted on Aug. 12. In it he announced that instead of paying $1 million, the FBISD would be responsible for reinterment of the remains and hold a public memorial service.
That’s likely to cost much less than $1 million. The larger sum would help ensure construction of a fitting memorial not only for the 95 African-Americans surreptitiously buried in Sugar Land decades ago, but also for the thousands of other inmates who died similarly ignoble deaths.
Prison systems in Texas and other Southern states following the Civil War exploited a clause in the Thirteenth Amendment that outlawed slavery except as punishment for a crime. Black men arrested for loitering or other trumped-up charges were thrown in prison and leased out to perform hard labor on farms, railroads and in mines. They were treated no better than slaves.
The sugar cane plantations that gave Sugar Land its name became known as the “Hellhole on the Brazos” because of the inhumane ways convict laborers were treated.
It’s anyone’s guess why the 95 souls whose bones were found in unmarked graves weren’t buried with fellow inmates in the Imperial State Prison Farm cemetery. The Texas Historical Commission is working with Texas Archaeological Research Laboratory at the University of Texas to collect genetic material from the remains for DNA testing.
A month ago, the school district seemed excited about the project. “Teaching our students and community about this oppressive and often unrecognized chapter of our local history remains one of our top priorities, as we are first and foremost an educational institution,” said Dupre. Then the district changed its tune.
Meanwhile, activists, including members of the Houston chapter of the National Black United Front, have accused the district of further desecrating the site where the remains were found. “I saw where at least half the land had been built over,” said Swatara Olushola, a member of district’s Sugar Land 95 steering committee. Dupre denies that charge.
With Fort Bend schools back in session, the last thing the adults should want to do is provide such a powerful lesson to children who should be learning how to work together for a common goal.
The district never should have said it would donate $1 million to help the county memorialize the Sugar Land 95 if it didn’t mean to keep that commitment. If it insists on withholding the money, however, that should not stop the efforts being made to tell the story of convict labor in Texas and across America. There are likely many individuals who would gladly donate to that worthy cause.