An affluent suburb of Houston, Sugar Land is lauded for its ethnic diversity, educated workforce, beautiful neighborhoods, excellent schools, and handsome town center. Recent events, however, have exposed a disturbing history, creating national and even international headlines and spurring lawsuits, emergency board meetings, and public demonstrations.

In 2017 Sugar Land’s Fort Bend Independent School District (FBISD) announced plans for a state-of-the-art technology center on a former state prison property. But site preparation stopped in February 2018 with the discovery of human bones during excavation. After months of work, forensic anthropologists from the Texas Historical Commission had exhumed the remains of 95 bodies.

Forensic analysis determined that the remains, which have come to be known as the “Sugar Land 95,” are those of African American people who died between 1878 and 1910. They ranged in age from 14 to 70 and all but one were male. Chains and bricks found alongside the bones provide evidence of the horrific conditions in which these people lived and died, and being buried far from the prison’s known cemetery—which “is mostly white men”—suggests that they were segregated by race in death as well as in life.

Stories like this bring the past back to life, forcing us to reckon with their implications.

Sugar Land’s History

Despite its sweet name, Sugar Land has a tortured past. In 1823 pioneer Texan Stephen F. Austin acquired Fort Bend County through a Mexican land grant. The settlers massacred the native Karankawa people to control the fertile floodplain of the Brazos River. Austin brought slavery to his community, distributing land proportionate to the number of enslaved people each family owned—enslaving more people brought more wealth. Until the Civil War, those families used sugar plantations to continue growing that wealth. But following emancipation, the “Sugar Bowl of Texas” went bankrupt.

After abolition, however, slavery was replaced by convict labor, “one of the harshest and most exploitative labor systems known in American history.” In 1878 Edward H. Cunningham and Littleberry A. Ellis, Confederate veterans turned business partners, purchased one of the last remaining sugar plantations, which they would eventually transform into the Imperial Sugar Company. The partners “borrowed” the entire state prison population for their business, and the Imperial State Prison Farm became the “hellhole on the Brazos.” While it was renamed the Central State Prison Farm in 1930, it operated continuously from 1909 until 2011.

Following Sugar Land’s incorporation as a city in 1959, skilled immigrants poured in to fuel Houston’s booming energy industry. In the boomtown, the tragic history of convict leasing remained invisible. Institutions such as the Texas Historical Commission, Fort Bend Historical Commission, and Sugar Land Heritage Foundation perpetuated a hegemonic narrative of Sugar Land and the Austin family, erasing the African American history. That narrative has proven persistent: an equestrian monument to Stephen F. Austin—“Father of Texas”—went up in the Sugar Land town square in 2001. And in 2017, Sugar Land city manager Allen Bogard claimed that “there’s not a single facility, road, nor improvement that exists today in the city of Sugar Land that can be traced back to either the convict-lease program or slavery.” As Ida B. Wells wrote in 1893, “Those who commit the murders write the reports.” Sanitizing historical narratives transforms the cultural identities of places. How then, has writing massacre, enslavement, and convict leasing out of Sugar Land’s history changed it? And how can discoveries like the Sugar Land 95 awaken us to the truth?

Sugar Land Today and Tomorrow

Reginald Moore, a founder of the Texas Slave Descendants’ Society and the Convict Leasing and Labor Project, has dedicated his life to preserving the tragic history of Sugar Land. A self-described community activist, Moore has spent decades researching and uncovering the real history, and he had been warning FBISD for years about the likelihood of unearthing convict leasing sites. Moore’s research is now in the archives at Rice University, his life’s work preserved and available for all to study.

On December 16, city officials, including Fort Bend County Judge K. P. George, stood in solidarity with community members grieving for the Sugar Land 95 at a vigil in the Sugar Land town square. But in January 2019, FBISD superintendent Charles Dupre told the advisory council that the district still intended to secure court permission to move the bodies and build on top of the burial site. The prospects for honoring the deceased seemed grim, but activists pushed on and things began to change.

On February 12 the Fort Bend County Commissioners Court voted unanimously to negotiate an interlocal agreement to buy the site from FBISD. The following week, after appeals from U.S. Congressman Al Green, district attorney Brian Middleton, and other elected officials, the board finally voted 6-0 to drop all legal actions and start negotiating with Fort Bend County to sell the site.

These developments, which bring renewed hope for a memorial to honor the victims of convict leasing in Sugar Land, are the result of a long and arduous fight against the whitewashing of history. The leaders and community in Sugar Land, as well as other Americans facing the country’s difficult past, would do well to keep in mind Maya Angelou’s words: “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”