"Who are The Sugar Land 95?" Chassidy Olainu-Alade of Fort Bend ISD

What learning our local History can teach us about the present....The #SugarLand95 are the 95 African-American individuals unearthed during the construction of a public education building in Sugar Land, Texas, located in #FortBendCounty. Archaeologists found evidence that the 95 individuals belonged to the state of Texas' convict leasing system and were buried in unmarked graves. A century and a half ago, in the name of cheap labor, major landowners helped propagate a system of exploitation that would drive the growth of the region’s sugar industry throughout the 19th century. This system persisted after the Emancipation Proclamation and the ratification of the 13th Amendment. It did so with an assist from the State of Texas, which leased thousands of convicts, many of them Black, to area planters. Funneled through a corrupt legal system which charged and sentenced them with petty crimes designed to marginalize the formerly enslaved, many were “convicts” in name only. Their criminal convictions served as a mere formality to get them on sugar plantations, where they were brutalized by guards and worked in conditions as bad or worse than those that prevailed in the era of slavery.