A single backhoe’s load of dirt in early 2018 was all it took to unearth 95 battered and discarded skeletons and a history that the Imperial Sugar Corporation, the State of Texas, and the entire southern United States might have preferred remain buried.

But they had been well-warned. Reginald Moore, a former prison guard and caretaker of the state’s Old Imperial Farm Prison Cemetery had spent over 25 years researching the history of prisons, plantations and slavery in the southeastern “Sugar Bowl of Texas,” and he’d pleaded with city officials to conduct archaeological surveys before continuing development. He cautioned them that eventually, the dark history of the region’s sugar economy would come back to haunt the town just outside of Houston so aptly named Sugar Land.

Sugar caning had a long-standing reputation of being such miserable, back-breaking work that farms couldn’t even pay people to work the fields. It didn’t take long for most of the local sugar plantations to go entirely bankrupt once their unwilling workforce found freedom in 1865 when Texas was emancipated.

But the enterprising owners of a successful plantation that would go on to become the Imperial Sugar Company had another gambit to play. Since 1844, their neighbors in Louisiana had engaged in a practice known as “convict leasing.” Despite its relatively unassuming name, convict leasing was state-sanctioned slavery that was mutually beneficial for both plantation owners AND southern states. The enactment of “Black Codes” in southern states ensured a constant supply of prisoners (and thus constant income) by frivolously jailing black men for things like failing to get their employer’s permission to change jobs or flirting with white women, and plantation owners now had hassle-free labor with an added bonus: unlike slaves, leased convicts were easily replaceable and didn’t need to be well-fed or particularly cared for at all. If they died, plantation owners buried them where they fell, chains and all, and simply requisitioned another.

And so in 1878, just 13 years after slaves were freed in Texas, the Imperial Sugar Company became one of the largest convict lease owners in American history, buying rights to the ENTIRE state’s prison population, and gaining a brand new nickname that reflected the horrific conditions that convict leasing allowed them to inflict on workers: “The Hellhole on the Brazos.” One inmate wrote that Imperial’s prison guards routinely reminded them that “the men did not cost them any money and the mules did,” a mentality that led to treatment so bad that “nobody was relieved until he dropped in his tracks.”

The painful legacy that Reginald Moore had begged Sugar Land officials to face was now one that they couldn’t look away from.

“The Sugar Land 95” (94 men and 1 woman) unearthed that day ranged from 14 to 70 years old, all with significant trauma to their bones. Despite outcry by 225 Texas historians asking the Fort Bend county officials to “make choices that acknowledge the national significance of this discovery… a burial ground [like which none other] has been found,” after DNA collection and artifact cataloguing, the Sugar Land 95 were reinterred back at the Fort Bend ISD construction site where they were found, with a memorial ceremony planned for this Spring.

When he spoke to the school district on behalf of the Sugar Land 95 he’d long fought to see acknowledged, Mr. Moore mourned that they were “being treated today in death the way they were treated when they were alive,” but took comfort in knowing that finally their truth could not be denied: “They existed.”

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