The graveyard’s discovery was vindication for historian Reginald Moore, but it prompted a battle against those who prefer Sugar Land’s past remain buried

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Behind a supermarket and across a highway from an airport catering to the private jet set, an education centre is rising in Texan fields bookended by fast-food chains, strip malls and residential streets lined with beige McMansions.

The scene in the Houston suburb of Sugar Land is more remarkable than it first appears. Construction crews working for the local school district uncovered human remains in February last year in what proved to be an unmarked burial ground for 95 people.

Bones that revealed a Texas town's forgotten racial past deserve respect Read more

They are thought to be African American prisoners aged 14 to 70 forced into backbreaking work on sugar plantations in a post-civil war system known as convict leasing that has been described as the continuation of slavery.

The find was vindication for Reginald Moore, a local historian who was convinced Sugar Land’s soil hid a dark secret underneath a stretch of suburbia that resembles so much of the modern American landscape.

But even as the unearthing of the “Sugar Land 95” was hailed as a major discovery that helps shine light on a shameful episode in American history, Moore geared up for what would prove a yearlong battle against those he sensed would prefer that Sugar Land’s past remain buried.

Sugar Land is now a booming slice of Houston’s metropolis. The population of the one-time company town rose from 2,082 in 1960 to more than 118,000 today. A roadside sign invites drivers to tour model homes in the Imperial master-planned development, motto: “Living the Sweet Life!” The name of the minor league baseball club that plays around the corner, the Sugar Land Skeeters, is a jocular nod to the region’s copious mosquito population.

But it was not always this way. These suburbs were built over sugar plantations which consolidated into the Imperial Sugar company in the early years of the last century. It was the sugar industry that employed convict leasing where black prisoners would be rented out as free labor as farms struggled to cope with the loss of free labor with the end of slavery.

New laws in the south targeted African Americans and many prisoners, often black men given harsh sentences for minor offenses, were hired out to private businessmen and forced to toil in frequently lethal conditions. The practice was so common in Sugar Land, an area that now regularly features on “best places to live” lists, that it was once known as the “Hell Hole on the Brazos”.

Sugar Land is “building right over its history. The homes are built right over graves, unbeknownst to the homeowners,” said Barbara Crump Jones, a member of Moore’s group, the Convict Leasing and Labor Project.

The debate on how to remember the bloody past through the treatment of the 95 bodies has been intense.

The school district wanted to move the remains about half a mile away to the Old Imperial Farm cemetery, a modest plot containing the remains of inmates and guards who died at a local prison between 1912 and 1942.

But community activists fought the plan and the district, which said it would cost $18m to modify the education centre project and went to court for the right to relocate the remains, eventually changed its stance.

It held a press conference on Monday to herald the passage of a state law that will allow Fort Bend county to own and operate the cemetery – the prelude to what is likely to be the creation of a substantial memorial where the bodies were found.

I think there is no other site like this in the country where this many remains associated with the history of convict leasing have been found Caleb McDaniel

“It’s really unique. I think there is no other site like this in the country where this many remains associated with the history of convict leasing have been found,” said Caleb McDaniel, an associate history professor at Rice University.

He was among about 80 activists, experts, local officials and community members who gathered in a meeting room last week for a ceremony to mark Juneteenth – the public holiday that celebrates the end of slavery – and remember the 95 dead.

“We’ve been struggling, we’ve been fighting,” said Moore, a stocky 59-year-old whose interest in convict leasing was sparked when he worked as a guard at a nearby prison farm in the 1980s as Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs crammed facilities with black inmates serving long sentences for possessing often small quantities of crack cocaine.

A thin layer of perspiration glistened below the brim of Moore’s baseball cap as he sat outside on a typically humid Texas summer night. He wore a T-shirt with an image of Martin Luther King. His view encompassed a park, empty fields and the silos of the former Imperial Sugar refinery complex, part of which is now a children’s interactive museum and hosts a farmer’s market.

“Hopefully we can close the deals to be able to get the people interred correctly, get a memorial and a museum,” Moore said. “I believe they’re coming round to want to do the right thing. And the right thing is to leave the bodies where they are.”

Juneteenth commemorates 19 June 1865, when slavery officially ended in Texas – two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation had come into effect. It is a holiday in most states, including Texas, which also observes Confederate Heroes Day.

Legislation calling for reparations to be paid to descendants of the Sugar Land 95, should DNA testing of the bones make identification possible, failed to gain traction in the Texas legislature this year, but Moore believes the idea is appropriate.

“The word reparations means to repair and there’s a lot of repairing needs to be done,” he said.

Convict leasing in Texas officially ended in 1912 after a series of newspaper exposés, but lawmakers had an idea: make inmates work for the state instead. But to some extent, in the era of mass incarceration of black Americans, its legacy still lingers. Today, Texas holds more prisoners than any other state and is one of a handful of southern states that do not pay inmates for working typical prison jobs. Texas Correctional Industries, the state’s prison labour department, sold $84m worth of items and services in fiscal year 2017.

A national analysis in 2017 by the Prison Policy Initiative found that on average, incarcerated people earned between 86 cents and $3.45 a day for prison jobs – with rates on the decline.

California reportedly saves $100m a year by using prisoners to fight fires.

Black people comprise 40% of America’s incarcerated population but only 13% of the country’s inhabitants.

“The convict lease system is the clearest bridge from slavery to the system of mass incarceration that we have today,” said Jay Jenkins, an attorney with the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition.

“For too long in the state of Texas and across the United States these things have been viewed as matters of inconvenience and not as the legacy of cruelty and horror that we need to reconcile with.”

Moore acted as emcee for the Juneteenth event, which featured speeches, historical presentations and a church choir that led the room in the singing of Lift Every Voice and Sing, also known as the Negro National Anthem:

Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us Facing the rising sun of our new day begun Let us march on till victory is won

Afterwards, as night fell, the group headed outside to a basketball court in the park. “This is for the ancestors, the ones who were beaten, ostracised,” Moore said, as battery-operated candles flickered orange and were held aloft.

In the background, the giant neon Imperial Sugar sign at the old factory glowed red and blue. The building is disused, though there are plans to turn it into a boutique hotel.