Kai Wright: It's Notes from America. I'm Kai Wright. In our last show, we celebrated Juneteenth with our friends in Houston. Now I want to share with you another part of the history of Black emancipation that can be well understood by focusing in on Texas. The Texas Newsroom, which is a consortium of public media in the state, has launched a new podcast called Sugar Land. The 13th Amendment to the Constitution ended slavery in the United States, of course, but with the notable exception of forced labor for people who are incarcerated. Sugar Land tells a striking story about that history and how it has come forward today.

I'm going to share Episode 1 with you in a moment, and you'll learn more of the history there but first, I want to introduce you to the co-host and executive producer of Sugar Land, Brittney Martin.

Brittney Martin: Hi. Thank you for having me.

Kai Wright: Maybe the first thing you can do here to get us all queued up for this to hear Episode 1 is just introduce the place Sugar Land for a second. What is this place?

Brittney Martin: Sugar Land is its own city. It's outside of Houston. I think about 20 minutes west of Houston. It has this reputation as one of the first places that white people settled in Texas. The "Father of Texas", Stephen F. Austin, he picked the Sugar Land area as the place where he would presumably set up his homestead. He never really got around to that. That's where the first white settlers in Texas were. Sugar Land really prides itself on its first colony roots, and, of course, as being the home of Imperial Sugar, which is a massive national sugar brand. That's where it's based, Sugar Land.

Kai Wright: The Imperial Sugar is going to be an important part of the story we're going to hear in this podcast because the labor associated with this came from something called convict leasing. Introduce convict leasing to people who have not heard of this phrase.

Brittney Martin: They wouldn't be alone. I have not heard of convict leasing until the cemetery, which we discussed in the podcast was discovered in 2018. Even having grown up in Texas had never heard of it. Convict leasing was a system adopted across the South in the decades following the Civil War, where a lot of people, not just Black men, but a lot of Black men were arrested for any number of "crimes", ranging from stealing a horse or a pig. Presumably stealing a horse or a pig may not necessarily have done so. They were arrested, they were sent to Huntsville, where the prison is, and then they were leased out for their labor to private railroads, sugar farmers, cotton farmers, and made to do the same work that slaves did just a few years before.

Kai Wright: Like you said, you hadn't heard of it, how did you come to this story? What made you notice the story we're about to hear?

Brittney Martin: In 2018, around July of 2018, news reports started coming out of Houston saying that a cemetery had been discovered on land where Fort Bend Independent School District was building a new school. They just kept finding body after body after body. Eventually, they found 95 remains. They started finding them in February of 2018, and in July, they announced that these people were likely convicts who were part of the convict lease system. It was then that I thought, what's comically saying and why is this significant, and I had never heard of it, and was so surprised that I had never heard of it because it's a massive part of making Texas what it is today.

Kai Wright: You went to school, you were educated in Texas, no less. I just wonder about you and your co-host suggest this in the episode we're about to hear just about the racialized nature of you not having heard of it as a white person in Texas. Talk to me about that. What did your race have to do with you not having heard about it, do you think?

Brittney Martin: At first, I was just, I felt some sort of shame maybe in having not heard of it before. I thought it was because I was white, and because I grew up in a predominantly white part of Houston, northeast Houston. Then we started reporting this story, and I heard it from all kinds of people. I heard it from Black people, I heard it from Hispanic people, I heard it from scholars, and all kinds of people that really spanned all these demographics.

It started to sink in like no one was taught this. My co-host, Naomi, she said the same thing. She had never really heard of it until much later in her life. We both went to Texas public schools. We're educated in Texas, and it's just left out.

Kai Wright: I guess, how did you feel about that? Was that a provocation, was that an indictment? What was your reaction to your ignorance, I guess?

Brittney Martin: Yes, all of the above. It felt like, okay, well, now we absolutely have to give this story it's due. It wasn't enough to just say, the cemetery was found and isn't that crazy that convict leasing existed. The more you look into it, the more you realize that basically, all of Texas' major decisions are based on racism and anti-Blackness. Once you start to see that, you can't unsee it. It really colors how you see everything about this state and our history. For that to not have been communicated to me, I feel like I was just having these aha moments over and over and over again.

Of course, that made me want to tell everyone else that I knew. Yes, I'm hoping that making this information more public and telling everyone we know will maybe make a change and change the way that people understand our history and the way that it's presented to students and everybody else.

Kai Wright: We're going to listen to the first episode of Sugar Land, and then dear listener, at the end of that, we're going to come back and have a couple more questions for Brittney to talk about what's going to come up next. Here is Episode 1 of Sugar Land.

Brittney Martin: It's a warm spring afternoon, and we're walking through a patch of dry grass in Sugar Land, Texas, a city about 20 miles outside of Houston. Two nearby highways fill the air with a constant hum, occasionally broken up by the sound of a plane landing at the tiny airport just behind us.

Naomi Reed: We're approaching a brand new school building, the James Reese Career and Technical Center. It's very modern--light brick, sharp angles, and floor-to-ceiling windows that students stream past on their way to auto shop and culinary classes.

Brittney Martin: That's not why we're here. See, in 2018, a few months into building this school, a backhoe operator was filling in a trench when he spotted...a bone.

Newscaster: "Now to a developing story out of Sugar Land where a construction site has turned into an excavation site. Crews working on a Fort Bend ISD building discovered an historic cemetery on those grounds. So far, the remains of more than 30 people have been found."

Brittney Martin: Day after day, more bodies were unearthed. Each grave was draped with a plastic tarp, and soon the whole field was covered. I know what you're thinking, and no, this is not a true crime podcast. At least not in the way you'd expect. This wasn't a serial killer's dumping ground or anything like that, but it was evidence of a particularly dark period in our country's history. Evidence I bet many in Sugar Land wished had stayed hidden.

Naomi Reed: By the end of that summer in 2018, a total of 95 bodies have been found, and immediately, everyone started asking the same question, one that remains unanswered all these years later, who was buried here?

Brittney Martin: Two years ago, we set out to tell the story of these 95 people. Who were they? What happened to them? It turns out that their story is just as much about them as it is about the people who have been trying to control them for over a century.

Michael Blakey: "These remains do not belong to anyone other than their descendants. They do not belong to you. You don't own them. You have no rights to them."

Naomi Reed: Ultimately, this is a story about power.

Charles Dupre: "There just comes a point where, as a leader, you've got to say this is what we're doing, and this is why..."

Naomi Reed: Who gets it, and how they wield it.

Sam Collins: "By identifying descendants, now you're bringing more people to the table that may not agree with you. So let's really not find those folks."

Brittney Martin: I'm Brittney Martin, an independent journalist based in Houston.

Naomi Reed: I'm Naomi Reed, an assistant professor of anthropology at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas.

Brittney Martin: This is Sugar Land, an investigative podcast series about the 95 souls laid to rest here and the systems that buried them, presented by The Texas Newsroom.

[music]

Newscaster: "And Fort Bend ISD officials say it's still too early to know just who is buried here, but this Sugar Land man says he believes he knows, and he says it's something he's been working to get acknowledged for nearly 20 years."

Naomi Reed: That man was Reginald Moore.

Reginald Moore: "The system said you were free unless convicted of a crime, and so that's how they was able to get slavery back."

Naomi Reed: Moore, who everyone affectionately calls "Reggie", was impossible to miss. He was 6 foot 2, with a booming voice and the cadence of a preacher. When we started working on this series, his name was the one we heard over and over again.

Various voices: "Mr. Reggie Moore, Mr. Moore, Reggie, Mr. Moore, Reggie, Reginald, Reginald Moore."

Brittney Martin: That's because he spent years pushing the City of Sugar Land to acknowledge its not-so-sweet origins. Near the turn of the century, Sugar Land was home to the largest hubs for convict leasing in Texas. The practice of leasing convicts for labor was adopted across the South in the decades following the Civil War. Reggie would show up at city council, school board, and county commissioners' meetings to explain how Black male prisoners were most often lent out to sugar farmers and forced to do the grueling work of harvesting sugar cane.

Naomi Reed: Convict leasing solved two major issues facing white landowners at the time. First, it provided a cheap workforce to replace the slaves they'd lost. Second, it created an environment where they could keep treating Black people as second-class citizens. Reggie believed the graves found at the school construction site belonged to those Black prisoners who worked and died on local sugar plantations. He'd been saying the same for years, long before their bodies were actually found.

Brittney Martin: Every time he spoke publicly, Reggie wore this one t-shirt his wife bought him years ago on a trip to Atlanta. It's black with a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. stenciled on the front in gold. Reggie followed in MLK's footsteps.

Reginald Moore: "I have a dream that one day these free men of neglected and exploited souls would be recognized for their hard works and contributions for Sugar Land and constructing this great state of Texas in the Reconstruction Era."

Naomi Reed: His message, like his shirt, was always the same. This city and this state were built on the backs of exploited Black men, and for that, they deserve our apologies, our recognition and our respect.

Brittney Martin: For Naomi and I, this story hits close to home. I was born and raised in Houston. I went to Texas public schools and graduated from the University of Texas. I've written for newspapers and magazines across the state. Actually, I've never lived anywhere else, but before these 95 bodies were found, I'd never heard of convict leasing. At first, I thought maybe that was because I was a white girl who grew up in a mostly white part of town. The more we got into this, I heard the same from all kinds of different people. It's a pretty glaring omission from our history books.

Naomi Reed: It definitely is. I grew up in the shadows of Sugar Land, next door in Missouri City. Sugar Land was wider. It had nicer homes, better schools, the mall, better football stadiums. Missouri City felt like the lesser place to live and learn. When I grew up, I wanted to understand how kids on the other side of town understood people like me, kids from Missouri City, Black people. At 28 years old, I started doing ethnographic fieldwork at a public high school there.

For a year, I went to three different US History classes, and talked to 15-year-olds about what they were learning about race. I discovered that Sugar Land has needed to have a race conversation for a long time. I've been talking about this place and how Blackness, Black people, and Black history have been ignored for years, so when Brittney approached me about doing this podcast, I was game.

Brittney Martin: We started where anyone researching convict leasing in Sugar Land would start, with Reginald Moore.

Sugar Land City Councilman: "We'll move to Item 1-Public Comment. Those citizens desiring to speak for public comment have signed up and I'd like to call you up."

Brittney Martin: In the summer of 2013, the City of Sugar Land was looking to invest in some new parks projects.

Sugar Land City Councilman: "Please introduce yourself. State your address for the record and then you'll be given three minutes for public comment."

Brittney Martin: There were a few proposals on the table--a network of hike and bike trails, a festival site, and a sports park. Definitely not on the list, a memorial to convict leasing.

Naomi Reed: That didn't stop Reggie from showing up to ask for one.

Sugar Land City Councilman: "We'll move to the next speaker, Mr. Reginald Moore. Mr. Reginald Moore is speaking on our agenda 4A resolution. Mr. Moore?"

Reginald Moore: "Yes, my name is Reginald Moore. I'm a historian, preservationist, and I'm a former correctional officer with the Jester Unit."

Brittney Martin: His request might sound a little rambling, but that's just how he talked, and he opened with a pretty big ask.

Reginald Moore: "Part of the money out of the bond election, I'd like for them to build a museum in honor of the convict lease system."

Brittney Martin: He also wanted the city to start proactively searching for unmarked convict graves.

Reginald Moore: "So, because there wasn't any archeological studies, the concerns are where these people are buried, and those homeowners would like to know where these bodies are. Are they living on grave sites? So, I'm petitioning the city for archeological studies on this particular property."

Naomi Reed: Remember, this was five years before the graves were discovered, but Reggie just knew their bodies were out there.

Reginald Moore: "I've been petitioning this for years--10, 12, 13 years, so I'd like to see this get done while we have a bond included in there. Thank you."

Sugar Land City Councilman: "Thank you, Mr. Moore. Thank you for being here tonight."

Naomi Reed: As Reggie said, this meeting wasn't the first time he'd made this kind of request.

Jay Jenkins: "The way he comes on, because he comes on so strong, gives, or gave, I think some people in their mind sort of permission to dismiss him."

Naomi Reed: This is Jay Jenkins, a white attorney originally from Iowa, who also happens to be one of Reggie's closest friends and fiercest defenders.

Jay Jenkins: "It was almost like people, they felt like they were dealing with a telemarketer or something that they could just dismiss because he's going to come back the next time and the next time and say the same thing, and so, there's no point in really addressing it."

Naomi Reed: We've learned that persistence was Reggie's calling card, and it wasn't limited to his activism.

Marilyn Moore: "We officially met in 1998. We went to the same church, and we ended up in the same Sunday school class."

Brittney Martin: This is Reggie's wife, Marilyn Moore. She's a whole head shorter than him and has the kindest eyes behind her cat-eye frames.

Marilyn Moore: "Even then, he was very passionate, and he was, it seemed like he was in distress. I just asked the class to pray for him."

Brittney Martin: I spoke with Marilyn on a stormy afternoon last summer. Her house is on the very edge of Harris County, just a mile or two north of Sugar Land.

Marilyn Moore: "I remember one Sunday, I came in late, and I had to sit next to him. I could see him looking at me from head to toe, and it just got on my nerves. You know, why is he looking at me? Why don't you stop looking at me? I don't know the timeline, how much later it was that he called me."

Brittney Martin: See? Persistence.

Marilyn Moore: "He got my number from somebody in the class and called me and left a message on my answering machine, and said that, 'Well, I wasn't at Sunday school on Sunday, so I'm just checking to see what happened.' I'm saying, 'Yeah, right.' So, I finally called him back, and we talked for a long time."

Brittney Martin: She still wasn't sold on the idea when he asked her out.

Marilyn Moore: "He asked me about going out on Friday and I said. 'Well, usually my kids and I--that's pizza night for us.' So, I said, 'Well, I have to see if I can get someone to stay with my kids. That was my--I thought I was going to get out of it."

Brittney Martin: "Right? You're like, 'Oh no, can't find anybody.'"

Marilyn Moore: "Right? I didn't look."

Brittney Martin: Reggie kept calling, and his persistence paid off. Six months later, they were married.

Naomi Reed: Back then, Reggie was working as a longshoreman, loading and unloading ships coming into the Houston Ship Channel. It was a job he'd had since he was 18, that is, except for a short stint in the '80s when he was laid off during an economic slump.

Brittney Martin: That's when he got a job as a guard at a men's prison in Fort Bend County, and it was there that he first started digging into the history of convict leasing in the area.

Marilyn Moore: '85 through '88, I think, working in there and seeing how they were treated and those kind of things, it reminded him of slavery.

Naomi Reed: When the economy rebounded, Reggie went back to his longshoreman job, but he kept thinking about convict leasing.

To better understand Reggie's quest, you need to know a little more about this place and its history.

Brittney Martin: Today, Sugar Land is one of many desirable suburbs on the outskirts of Houston. In the early 1800s, it was home to the hottest real estate in Texas. When the father of Texas himself, Stephen F. Austin, was doling out land to the state's earliest non-native settlers, he chose this area for his homestead.

Naomi Reed: The Brazos River runs right through the city and south, all the way to Galveston Bay. That meant the area had fertile soil, plenty of fresh water, and easy access to a major port.

Brittney Martin: In this way, Sugar Land is really proud of its heritage. There's First Colony Mall, a neighborhood called New Territory, Settlers Way Park, and neighborhoods and streets named something plantation or colonial something, but the identity of this city embraces more than anything is right in the name--Sugar Land.

[soundbite of archived recording]

Voice-over: Sugar Land--the city that sugar built.

Brittney Martin: Early white settlers found the land was great for cultivating sugarcane and spent decades growing and processing raw sugar, first relying on slaves and, later, convict labor.

Naomi Reed: In the first half of the 1900s, basically, everyone who lived in Sugar Land worked for Sugar Land Industries, or its sister company, Imperial Sugar.

[soundbite of archived recording]

Commercial: “Imperial pure cane, uniform-quality sugar outsells all others in the Southwest.

[singing] Ladies, whenever you buy sugar. Please remember this refrain. Imperial Sugar is 100% cane, pure cane.

Imperial pure cane, uniform-quality sugar.

Yes, indeed.”

Brittney Martin: I can't tell you how long that song has been stuck in my head.

Naomi Reed: Schools in the area used to tour the Imperial Sugar refinery. My mom was a teacher, and one of my most vivid memories was tagging along with her and her third-grade class on a field trip there. I was probably 11. We climbed like 90 sets of stairs to get to the top. I remember being so tired and sore because I was recovering from a broken leg at the time. I can vaguely picture big vats of sugar, and the tour was mainly about processing it, but I don't remember hearing anything about the people who made it all happen, especially before the refinery was industrialized.

Brittney Martin: Yes, growing up, I honestly didn't know there were other brands of sugar. We only ever had Imperial at home. It's got that royal blue crown logo on every package with Since 1843 above it.

[soundbite of archived recording]

Voice-over: It was here in 1843 that the first cane sugar mill in Texas was built, and thus, more than a century ago, cane sugar became the cornerstone for one of Texas' great industries, providing one of the world's vital products--pure cane sugar.

Naomi Reed: That was the story we grew up hearing. It was a family-run sugar mill that blossomed into a thriving company town, but the middle part of that story always seems to get left out.

Brittney Martin: It's the part that made the company town possible, that helped infuse millions of dollars into the Texas economy when it needed it most. That's the part Reggie dug into.

[break]

Brittney Martin: Shortly after he and Marilyn got married, Reggie retired.

Marilyn Moore: "He had real bad arthritis, so he was able to retire based on his disability."

Naomi Reed: He became a full-time activist.

Brittney Martin: I asked Marilyn, "Did he ever take any time to just chill?"

Marilyn Moore: "He was not a chilled type of person. He liked to have fun and stuff like that, but then he had this extremely serious side, especially when he really got involved full time in convict leasing and looking at prison reform and that kind of thing."

Brittney Martin: A lot of people, myself included, wondered why Reggie stayed so fixated for so long on something that happened over 100 years ago. The more I learned about convict leasing, the more I realized just how much of our state and nation's history is about race, racism, and anti-Blackness. It formed this pattern that I can unsee.

Naomi Reed: Yes, and convict leasing isn't the only link in the chain connecting slavery to modern-day structural racism, but it's a really big one. On a purely logistical level, convict leasing played a major role in recuperating Texas after the Civil War. Leased convicts were forced to build railroads, mine iron, even quarry the granite and limestone used to build the Texas State Capitol. Convict leasing wasn't just economically beneficial. It was a highly effective form of social control. The white ruling class used convict leasing to maintain the power imbalance in the South. They realized they didn't need to arrest every Black man to keep the entire population of African Americans in line.

Douglas Blackmon: "That's the whole idea. You scare a bunch of people into behaving a certain way, whatever that is, by creating terrible penalties for some small group of people who engage in the thing you don't want other people to do."

Naomi Reed: This is Douglas Blackmon, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Slavery by Another Name. It explores the failure of reconstruction, Black codes, and convict leasing in the Deep South. During this era, prisoners from all demographics released by the Texas penitentiary, but Black men were particularly in demand on farms in places like Sugar Land.

Douglas Blackmon: "It was an economic need that was related to making it really clear to the millions of other Black people that they needed to go along with these terrible arrangements that the white landowners were demanding of them. That they needed to agree to an ongoing subsistence life, rather than have something as terrible as ending up at Sugar Land in chains or in a coal mine in Alabama. You know, 'Well, that's so much worse. I'll go along with this terrible situation that I'm already in. I'll go another generation or two in this. It's a form of social control, just like lynching was a form of social control and all these other things."

Naomi Reed: For African Americans in the post-Civil War south, freedom wasn't necessarily expected or protected, and convict leasing showed how easily it could be revoked at any time.

Douglas Blackmon: "That's all a part of the story of how this instinctive American sense that the world is better and more stable if Black people and Black men specifically are significantly under the control of the state."

Naomi Reed: Just after Reggie retired, the State of Texas began selling off large sections of prison land in Fort Bend County, including the plot containing the 95 bodies we now refer to as, "The Sugar Land 95." In 2003, over 2,000 acres were sold to a developer to build Telfair, a brand new master-planned community, which Reggie mentioned at basically every public meeting he attended. Reggie worried that the development would cover up the land's history as a plantation worked by leased convicts.

Reginald Moore: "The state is selling all these private plantations that were part of the prison system. These were plantations that became prisons.

Naomi Reed: He got to work, tracking down historical surveys, contacting regulators, and taking meetings with city officials.

Reginald Moore: "I'm here again to speak about the convict lease system."

Brittney Martin: He spent years asking the city, the county, the state, even the US Army Corps of Engineers, to search the land for convict graves.

Reginald Moore: "We've been asking, pleading and crying for 15 years to get some help out here. To do some ground penetrating radar on this site. Nobody's wanted to touch it."

Naomi Reed: Reggie's activism honestly became even more impressive to us when his wife Marilyn mentioned he managed to do it all with very little technology.

Marilyn Moore: "Never used a computer. Never used a cell phone."

Brittney Martin: "Ever?"

Marilyn Moore: "He had other people doing things, including me, for him on the computer. He did everything on the house phone. He would go to the library. He would go to the Historical Commission. He would go to Sugar Land, wherever to find information. People were willing to help him. I don't know if they saw his passion for it or wanted him to just go away. I know I wouldn't want to have to deal with him when he was in hot pursuit."

Naomi Reed: That seems universally true. His persistence wore on a lot of people, and his warnings and requests were often dismissed.

Reginald Moore: "If you don't put the museum up--[crosstalk]

Sugar Land City Councilor: “Mr. Moore, your time is up.”

Reginald Moore: “–and we'll put it up ourselves.”

Sugar Land City Councilor: “Your time is up. Thank you. Thank you for your comment…”

Brittney Martin: Despite all the years of brush-offs and rejections, Reggie's work eventually paid off.

Remember the new school we visited...In October 2017, the day after contractors showed up to work there, Reggie was there, too. He told them that they were attempting to build on an African American grave site.

Naomi Reed: Despite having no concrete proof of that at the time. Remember, the first bones weren't discovered until five months later, in February 2018.

Brittney Martin: Reggie also called the state agency in charge of safeguarding historical sites--the Texas Historical Commission.

Naomi Reed: At first, the Fort Bend Independent School District was undeterred. In an email, the district's chief operations officer said, "We feel that we have done our due diligence and work on the site continues."

Brittney Martin: The Historical Commission disagreed. They sent a letter to the district the next day recommending they hire a professional archeologist to monitor construction.

Naomi Reed: Reggie kept making calls, and within a week, the district had hired a team of archeologists to monitor and survey the site.

Brittney Martin: If you're wondering if the district was happy about being painted into a corner like that, listener, they were not.

Naomi Reed: Not at all.

Brittney Martin: [chuckles] Original estimates showed the monitoring work would cost the district about $45,000, and it ended up being much, much more.

Naomi Reed: They already weren't thrilled about the extra cost, but then Reggie went and really pissed them off. One week after they hired the archeologists, some Fort Bend ISD board members were at a local middle school when Reggie approached them. Dave Rosenthal served on the district's board of trustees from 2012 to 2022. According to him, that day, Reggie "hijacked the conversation with his concerns."

Brittney Martin: That wasn't what set them off. We should add that Dave Rosenthal didn't respond to our interview requests for this series. We're quoting from emails he wrote at the time. Actually, you be Rosenthal and read what he said about Reggie.

Naomi Reed: Okay, I'm Dave Rosenthal. "Grayle and I genuinely engaged him, took an interest in his story, and even proposed some innovative ideas related to his cause."

Brittney Martin: All of that seems to be true. Here's part of a message Reggie left for his friend, Jay Jenkins, a few days later.

Reginald Moore: "I was able to talk with their board this past Monday, and I had their attention. I got their attention. They were looking to do something with me, and they was concerned about it. They felt the plea."

Brittney Martin: But then...

Reginald Moore: "When they got up to do the national anthem and the pledge of allegiance, I turned my back to the flag because of what happened with Article 13 and what happened with Texas implementing it. The cause and effect up until this day. They changed their mind about wanting to deal with me."

Naomi Reed: He's talking about the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which states that, quote, "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States." That single caveat ushered in the era of convict leasing.

Brittney Martin: Rosenthal, the board member, was so upset by Reggie's protest that he threatened to hold the archeological survey hostage until Reggie apologized. Here, be Rosenthal again.

Naomi Reed: Okay, I'm Rosenthal. "After witnessing the rude behavior of Mr. Reginald Moore on Monday evening at Quail Valley Middle School, I do not believe the district should have anything to do with this man. I understand his animosity due to his belief that some dark history has possibly been ignored, but don't drag our school, its staff, and worse, our students into this. I am considering writing a resolution asking the district to cease the archeological study until Mr. Moore publicly apologizes to all parties individually and to the district for his actions."

Brittney Martin: Reggie said the board members misunderstood the target of his protest. He said he turned his back on the flag, not the kids.

Reginald Moore: "So, I need a little help, man. Need a little influence to maybe let them know what we're all about, and see what could be done with that. If you could, I need you to stand with me on this, so, if you can give them a call. I'm asking them to go back and look at their footage that they took and see that I did not turn my back to the kids, but right where I'm at now is at a crucial point, whether or not they want to make us a part of it, but if not, then I guess I have to go back to ground zero, you know, so here I am again."

[music]

Naomi Reed: He sounds so dejected.

Brittney Martin: I know, but luckily, Charles Dupre, who was superintendent of Fort Bend ISD at the time, managed to talk Rosenthal off this particular ledge. He was like, listen, the Historical Commission basically said we had to hire the archeologist, but even if they hadn't, it's a good PR move for us to be proactive.

Naomi Reed: Quick reminder, all of this drama happened during the first month of construction on the new school. They hadn't even found a single grave yet. This was still October 2017, and the archeologists had just arrived to monitor construction. Reign Clark told us about it the first time we spoke on the phone.

Reign Clark: "We were actually monitoring trenching and placement of utilities and drilling piers for the foundations and everything and saw nothing of much consequence. Until that day in February."

Brittney Martin: Reign's team from Goshawk Environmental Consulting monitored construction of the school for three months and dug trenches to search for any remains or culturally significant historic artifacts. During that time, they found none. They finished up their work in January and began writing up their report for the Texas Historical Commission. Then, one month later, the first bones were found.

Reign Clark: "When some of the workers were backfilling a trench, they saw some bone fragments, and they'd been seeing agricultural remains and things like cow bones and horse bones and sheep and pig and all that they'd been seeing that the whole time, but there was something a little different about these bones."

Brittney Martin: I'm convinced Reggie had spies all over the city because he always seemed to know things before they were made public.

Naomi Reed: The discovery of the first remains was no different. He left this voicemail for Jay.

Reginald Moore: "Hey, Jay, this is Reg. Give me a call, man. Give me a call back as soon as you can. I've got some good news today. I'm hearing from two different sources that they've possibly found graves out there and the archeologists are back out there today. That's a major plus in trying to get everything authenticated and moving forward with the museum and the memorial and all. Man, that's awesome there."

Naomi Reed: He was hopeful and happy. He thought, finally, people would have to listen to what he'd been saying all along. They'd have to acknowledge how these Black men were exploited. They'd have to face the truth, make amends, pay reparations. Finally, things would be different.

Brittney Martin: But...he was wrong.

[music]

Naomi Reed: Next time on Sugar Land.

Charles Dupre: "They came back, and they said, 'These are human remains,' and so that was kind of very much, 'Okay, This is real.'"

Reginald Moore: "Hey, Jay, Reg. Man, give me a call back. Man, they found 20-something bodies out there at that cemetery."

Newscaster: "The Texas Historical Commission wants the public to contact them if they think they might be descendants of those discovered at this unmarked cemetery."

Charles Dupre: "The attorney said the district cannot maintain a cemetery, so, what are your options at that point?"

Jay Jenkins: "They were more concerned about getting Reggie to sign off on letting them move the bodies and continue construction than they were about actually paying these people any respect."

Reign Clark: "We have an opportunity to put a name to these individuals. This is a completely unique situation and to not do DNA analysis, it would be a travesty."

Brittney Martin: Archival audio in this episode, courtesy of the Reginald Moore Sugar Land Convict Leasing System Collection at the Woodson Research Center at Rice University.

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Sugar Land is a production of the Texas Newsroom and was completed with the support of a grant from Columbia University's Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights, with funding provided by Arnold Ventures, and a grant from the Convict Leasing and Labor Project.

Sugar Land is written and reported by Brittney Martin and Naomi Reed. Our editor is Rachel Osier Lindley. Engineering and Sound Design by Jacob Rosati. Fact-Checking by Billy Brennan. Audio editing by Bennett Smith. Music by JaRon Marshall. Recording Engineering by Jake Perlman. Production help from Rafa Farihah.

The Texas Newsroom is a public radio journalism collaboration that includes NPR, KERA in North Texas, Houston Public Media, KUT in Austin, Texas Public Radio in San Antonio, and other stations across the state. Corrie MacLaggan is the statewide managing editor.

The Texas Newsroom received support for Sugar Land from FRONTLINE's Local Journalism Initiative, which is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Visit sugarlandpodcast.com to learn more about everything we discuss in this series.

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Kai Wright: That was Episode 1 of Sugar Land. You should get all eight episodes wherever you get your podcast. I am joined again by the co-host and executive producer Brittney Martin. Brittney, where is the story going from here? What should people be looking out for?

Brittney Martin: I think it just gets better and better after Episode 1. We tell the story of Reginald Moore's journey into activism and through the Sugar Land 95 fight really over what to do with their remains. We ended the first episode. Reginald Moore was feeling really hopeful and vindicated in some way, but he quickly found that not everybody agreed with his view of where things should go from there. There were a lot of competing interests, and you hear how it plays out, but we go from how the bodies were handled after that, to how they've been handled since they were reburied, and how this history has brought us up until today. Still has a huge impact on Texas.

Kai Wright: When we started our conversation, you were pointing out you can't unsee the history of race once you started seeing it in Texas. Having now reported eight episodes of this, where does that leave you? You hadn't heard this history before, how has this changed you having done eight episodes of this?

Brittney Martin: I would say, I don't know. I just feel like my eyes are so much wider open. Not that I wasn't sympathetic or aware of current racial inequality in Texas. I feel that I was, but now I can really see so much more clearly how we got here. I feel this compulsion, honestly, to tell so many more people because I feel like if they knew, they would have more grace towards people of other races. If people just knew this history, they wouldn't have these racist inclinations.

That's the perspective that I tend to fall back on is how would my family who's very conservative and has been in Texas for generations and generations, how would they hear it and how would they respond to it? That's how I approach everything. [laughs]

Kai Wright: Have you found that when you introduce new information with your conservative family than on any number of things, but particularly on stuff involving race, that it does change them in some way?

Brittney Martin: Yes, I think so. When I approach things from a more human and narrative perspective, something that they can really relate to and see the humanity in, rather than just they're watching Fox News or whatever and everybody is yelling at them. When you approach it as a story, then they're human like everybody else, and they very much can come around and see how we got here and sympathize with it more.

Kai Wright: Because the power of story catches people's attention no matter what.

Brittney Martin: I think so. You start to realize it's not just an issue. It's not just inequality as a concept. It's real situations that very real people faced. As soon as you know that person's name and you hear their story, yes, they can start to see them as people rather than a concept.

Kai Wright: Have you shared any of your reporting on Sugar Land and convict leasing with them?

Brittney Martin: A little bit. I've talked to my dad about it, and he's so interested in just the fact that this happened, and he wasn't really aware of it. The fact that slavery was essentially replaced by this new system of convict leasing in Texas, and how it went on for so much longer than we realized. He seems interested so far.

Kai Wright: See, it's really striking to me because of the fact that, when I am feeling dark, my understanding of the world is people don't know the history because they don't want to know it, and that when presented with this history that we don't know, that people repel it and say that's a lie that I don't trust it. That it feels like certainly in recent years, as we've had these history wars, people are increasingly trained to say, "No, that's not real. You're telling me this new history. If I've not heard it before, it must not be real."

Brittney Martin: Yes.

Kai Wright: You're telling me you have a lived experience that's different than that?

Brittney Martin: Yes. I would say that when you're not thinking about the very angry person who's showing up at a school board meeting with a sign, and screaming about changing curriculum, when you're thinking about real people that you know and love, who maybe just don't know something. There is a way, I think, to just talk to them like a person you know and love and say, "Hey, here's something that happened. You may not know about it, but here's some more information." Yes, so far I feel like it's possible to get through. I think another thing is rather than just saying, "No, that's not true." I think people really struggle to reconcile the negative history with the thing they know, and that's what makes people put their walls up, but you don't have to necessarily hate Sugar Land just because this history happened here.

Kai Wright: Right.

Brittney Martin: You can still love the place you live and understand how it became a city. There's two things, and you don't have to say it's evil to appreciate the history, and you don't have to say it's great and deny the history.

Kai Wright: You can have both.

Brittney Martin: Yes.

Kai Wright: You can add the history of these 95 humans to the history you knew. They can exist alongside it, too.

Brittney Martin: Yes, makes it more rich, I think.

Kai Wright: Yes. Well, thank you for that dose of optimism, and thank you for this reporting, Brittney.

Brittney Martin: Thank you.

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