The Depths of White Denial, Black Labor, and the Legacy of the Sugar Land 95

Abstract

This essay explores white denial through the telling of one visceral story, known as the Sugar Land 95. Its history spans approximately 150 years, from the post-Civil War period through the present. The Sugar Land 95 are people whose brutalized remains were exhumed on the grounds of the former Imperial Sugar plantation in Sugar Land, Texas, while excavating the land for a new vocational public school. They are 94 men and one woman between the ages of 14 and 70, incarcerated African-Americans who died gruesomely between 1878 and 1911, laboring as convicts leased from the Texas state prison system. Convict leasing was an early pillar of the prison industrial complex. The Sugar Land 95 is a story of white supremacist brutality, erasure, and ongoing denial, a set of truths that would have been whitewashed in the here and now were it not for the persistent efforts at the grassroots to force a reckoning.