Remains awaken history of Texas’ convict leasing
Bill Mills experienced firsthand the cruel conditions of Sugar Land’s notorious Imperial Prison Farm.
In 1910, he entered the Texas prison system shortly after his 17th birthday when he was arrested for horse theft. And though he went on to serve prison terms in Texas, Oklahoma and Georgia, it was his time at Imperial that remained etched in his memory.
“Human lives were not of value,” Mills wrote in his book “25 Years Behind Prison Bars.” “Nobody was relieved until he dropped in his tracks. The guards often said the men did not cost them any money and the mules did. That’s why there was more sympathy for the mules than for the men.”
More than a century later, near the land where Texas prisoners picked cotton under a scorching sun amid threats of whippings, the discovery of the remains of 95 African-Americans at a Fort Bend school district construction site has put a new focus on the brutal history of the state’s convict-leasing system and the use of inmates to make money for the prisons.
“In the end, what this really was, was a replacement for the system of slavery that had existed before the Civil War,” said Douglas Blackmon, author
of “Slavery by Another Name,” which details the convict-leasing system in the South. “There’s no place in America that proves that more powerfully than Sugar Land.”
As local activists and Fort Bend Independent School District officials discuss how to memorialize the remains, some say the discovery is an opportunity for the fastgrowing city southwest of Houston to come to terms with a dark chapter of its past.
Paul Gardullo, the curator of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, has applauded the efforts of local activist Reginald Moore to call attention to the site’s history. More than 200 historians signed a statement urging local officials to maintain the historical significance of the remains. Some have even called for a museum to remember those who suffered and died in what was once known as the “Hellhole on the Brazos,” where conditions were so bad that bluesman Lead Belly wrote a song about it after spending time there.
‘Burning hell’
Mills, a white Texas teenager, became an inmate as the state was ending the convict-leasing system. But he still witnessed extreme brutality as the system wound down and prison labor continued.
Growing up in Rains County and raised by Christian parents, he described himself as the black sheep of his family. A stuttering problem kept him out of school until he was 12. He worked in sawmills in East Texas and at Wild West shows, often hanging out with the wrong crowd.
At Imperial Farm in 1916, Mills wrote, he was viciously punished while working alongside a squad that included 16 inmates from Mexico and another white man.
Joe Ford, the other white man, was attempting to teach Mills Spanish when a captain reprimanded the men for talking. The captain ordered the two men to pick 600 pounds of cotton each by the end of the day to avoid a harsher punishment.
Mills got close, reaching 594 pounds. But it wasn’t enough. He was whipped for laziness.
In July 1917, an assistant captain known as “Pistol Pete” arrived at Imperial. He carried a 6-foot-long bullwhip and flailed inmates working the fields.
Mills described the 70 days that Pete managed the prison farm as “burning hell.”
Making money
The convict-leasing system began in Texas and other Southern states shortly after the Civil War, when officials realized that they had a large population of prisoners to care for and little money, according to author Donald Walker in “Penology for Profit,” a book about the Texas system.
Politicians thought leasing the prisoners to outside parties could be profitable. Private individuals would make payments for the convicts’ labor, while the state would oversee them.
The convict-leasing system in Texas also was overwhelmingly African-American.
“With regard to the legal system, black Texans existed essentially outside the protections of law,” Walker wrote. “For the most part, their strained financial circumstances rendered them unsearch able to avail themselves of legal counsel to defend their interests in court. They became, in effect, passive participants in any legal matters in which they were involved.”
According to a history of the Imperial Sugar Co., the Sugar Land countryside where the convicts toiled was described as a “low, mosquito-infested swamp,” where bayous held alligators and other “noisome creepers.”
“Convicts labored barelegged in wet sugar cane fields, dying like flies in the periodic epidemics of fevers,” R.M. Armstrong wrote in the book “Sugar Land Texas and the Imperial Sugar Company.”
The state profited so much that it had little incentive to examine how the prisoners were managed.
“Oversight was costly, and cost was exactly what the state was trying to minimize through the convict-leasing system,” said Rice University history professor Caleb McDaniel. “It wasn’t until it became clear that these abuses were widespread and affecting white prisoners that public opinion started to shift.”
Historic discovery
The discovery of the 95 remains last year didn’t surprise activist Moore, who served as a correctional officer for four years in the mid-1980s in Fort Bend County.
Watching convicts work in those Sugar Land fields reminded him of slavery. He began piecing together parts of the history, learning that Fort Bend County was part of the convict-leasing system.
When he learned of the school district’s construction plans, he warned officials that they might be building on the resting place of other prisoners. He was right.
As experts began exhuming remains over the summer, they discovered that all those buried there were black and that they ranged in age from teenagers to senior citizens. Preliminary re- found that the remains belonged to prisoners who worked on the land once used as a sugar plantation, according to court records filed by the school district.
A convict camp was established in the 1870s, and “use of the burial site likely continued through 1911 as the state of Texas operated the Imperial Prison Farm Camp No. 1 on the property,” according to court documents.
Questions still linger about how the bodies will be memorialized and who has the legal authority to authorize DNA analysis.
A cemetery task force established by the city in August was short-lived. The process broke down as task force members trying to identify a proper burial site learned that the school district and the city had formed an agreement listing the nearby gated Old Imperial Farm Cemetery as a final resting place. The city dissolved the task force in November and assigned responsibility to the school district.
In the latest twist, Fort Bend ISD petitioned the court for permission to move the remains to the gated cemetery, but the judge delayed a decision until March.
Meanwhile, the $58 million James Reece Career and Technical Center is still scheduled to open in the fall. The school district notes that construction delays and archaeological work has cost it $5.5 million, adding that it would cost an additional $18 million if it had to redesign the project to put the center on another part of the property to allow the remains to stay where they were discovered.
Moore doesn’t want others to forget history, which is why he is working to raise funds for a museum focused on the convict-leasing system. He wants the remains kept at the school district site, as do the majority of others who served on the cemetery task force.
He said he’s been inspired by the African Burial Ground Project, where the remains of 15,000 enslaved and free Africans were discovered in 1991 during the construction of a federal office building in New York City. The site was turned into a national monument with an interpretive center and a research library.
Some believe that the legacy of the convict-leasing system can still be seen in the Texas prison system, where blacks are overrepresented, with 32 percent of prisoners but just 12 percent of the state population, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.
Inmates still perform labor for the state prison system through offender programs such as Texas Correctional Industries, manufacturing goods that are available on a for-profit basis at 37 different facilities and that generated $84 million in profit in 2017.
Prisoners work for free making license plates, signs, soaps, shirts, pillows and mattresses. Some also work on farms — harvesting a variety of crops including cotton.
The convict-leasing system “cemented this legacy of racism in our system,” said Jay Jenkins, a project attorney with the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition who served on the cemetery task force. “It … also baked in this unimaginable cruelty into the system that we still see today.”
Remembering a painful past
Mills was able to escape the brutality at Imperial Farm. After serving 25 years in prison, he went on to become a lecturer and worked in ministry. He educated people about his life in crime and urged them not to take the same path.
“As I have spent more than half of my life a criminal, I am going to spend the rest of my life trying to prevent some young man or boy from making the mistakes that I have made,” Mills wrote. He died in 1968 at age 75 and was buried in his hometown in Rains County, according to death records.
The abuses of the convict-leasing system were exposed in 1908 and 1909 by George Waverley Briggs, a 25-year-old reporter with the San Antonio ExpressNews. The state government ended all contracts by 1912. More than a century later, author Blackmon said, the country should not forget its painful past.