Researcher: More convict laborers could be buried in county

When construction crews working near Fort Bend ISD’s new James Reese Career and Technical Center uncovered the remains of 95 African-American people back in 2018, the discovery ignited renewed interest in the state’s convict-leasing program and the lesser-known parts of Fort Bend County history.

But while the “Sugar Land 95” have inspired efforts to build a museum to honor the dead and spurred serious conversations about the role of racism in the state’s convict leasing program to farm sugarcane, that might also only be the start of a bigger story, according to a researcher at Rice University.

“The whole point of my research is to show that when you want to memorialize the past and honor the people, you need to think about the larger story,” said Serena Barbieri, a PhD candidate at Rice.

Barbieri has been conducting research into the state’s convict leasing program by reviewing data about the state’s convicts and trying to figure out who they were, where they were taken and what happened to them, she said.

And based on that research, it appears there may be hundreds more convicts who died in Fort Bend County, but haven’t yet been uncovered, she said.

“We’ll probably never recover their bones,” she said. “But what really matters is to keep them in mind as we think about how the system worked, and what they tell us about the evolution of the prison system.”

The 13^th Amendment ended chattel slavery as it was known before the Civil War, but permitted it as punishment for a crime. Experts estimate more than 3,500 prisoners died between the beginning of the Texas convict leasing system in the 1860s and the end of it in 1912, according to a Prison Legal News article.

The convict leasing system in Texas appeared to divide people based on race, Barbieri said. For instance, only one of the people who died as part of the system in Fort Bend County was white, while all others were either Black or Hispanic, she said.

“The reason for the white convict is still unknown to me,” she said. “It’s largely unusual. But I’m open to the possibility of finding more in the future.”

That’s because most of the work in the county took place on plantations, she said.

Conversely, most convicts who died while working on the railroads were white, she said.

Barbieri is examining the prison system in the years before Emancipation and following the data all the way up to 1910 in order to identify how things changed over the years, she said. For instance, the number of convicts increases after Emancipation, she said.

“It’s important to evaluate each case to understand the story,” she said.