Sugar Land 95
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The Sugar Land 95 refers to a group of 95 African American victims of the convict-leasing system whose remains were accidentally discovered during construction of the James Reese Career and Technical Center in Sugar Land, Texas.
After the 13th Amendment outlawed slavery in America, many southern business owners whose workforce was made up nearly entirely of slaves needed to find methods to replace their now-freed slaves. The need for cheap labor in the southern states resulted in the creation of the Black Codes, state laws meant to restrict the freedom of African Americans post-Civil-War and ensure that they would remain a source of inexpensive labor.[1]
The codes exploited a loophole in the 13th Amendment where slavery was disallowed "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." The Codes criminalized vagrancy, where unemployed African Americans could be criminalized and used in forced-labor projects. Freedmen were often forced to sign annual labor contracts with white landowners for work. The terms of these contracts often mirrored conditions under pre-Civil-War slavery, where African American workers would receive the lowest-possible pay for their work. They could also have wages deducted for loosely-defined acts such as "disobedience", "waste of time", or "absence from home without permission".[2] Failure to sign a contract could result in imprisonment or a fine, the former of which was likely to result in becoming a leased convict.