95 Unmarked Graves
Notes from America with Kai Wright
WNYC Studios
4.4 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 22 June 2023
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 2018, a few months into building a new school in Sugar Land, Texas, construction crews uncovered 95 unmarked graves. This wasn’t a serial killer’s dumping, but it was evidence of a particularly dark period in our country’s history - evidence many in Sugar Land wished had stayed hidden.
This is the story of these 95 people. Who were they? What happened to them? It turns out 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.
Kai talks to Brittney Martin, co-host and executive producer of the Sugar Land podcast. Then you’ll hear the first episode of the series.
The Sugar Land podcast is a production of DotProductions and the Texas Newsroom, a public radio journalism collaboration that includes NPR, KERA in North Texas, Houston Public Media, KUT in Auston, Texas Public Radio in San Antonio, and other stations across the state.
Check out more episodes of the Sugar Land podcast: https://www.sugarlandpodcast.com/
Tell us what you think. Instagram and Twitter: @noteswithkai. Email us at notes@wnyc.org. Send us a voice message by recording yourself on your phone and emailing us, or going to Instagram and clicking on the link in our bio.
“Notes from America” airs live on Sunday evenings at 6pm ET. The podcast episodes are lightly edited from our live broadcasts. Tune into the show on Sunday nights via the stream on notesfromamerica.org or on WNYC’s YouTube channel.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's Notes from America. I'm Kai Wright. In our last show, we celebrated Juneteenth |
| 0:13.6 | with our friends in Houston. And now I want to share with you another part of the history |
| 0:18.7 | of Black Emancipation that can be well understood by focusing in on Texas. The Texas Newsroom, |
| 0:25.1 | which is a consortium of public media in the state, has launched a new podcast called Sugarland. |
| 0:30.6 | The 13th Amendment to the Constitution ended slavery in the United States, of course, but with |
| 0:35.3 | the notable exception of forced labor for people who are incarcerated. And Sugarland tells a striking |
| 0:42.3 | story about that history and how it has come forward today. I'm going to share episode one |
| 0:48.3 | with you in a moment and you'll learn more of the history there. But first, I want to introduce |
| 0:52.4 | you to the co-host and executive producer of Sugarland, Brittany Martin. Hi, thank you for having me. |
| 0:59.6 | Okay, so maybe the first thing you can do here to get us all queued up for this to hear |
| 1:05.0 | episode one is just introduce the place Sugarland for a second. Where, what is this place? |
| 1:11.9 | Sure. So Sugarland is its own city. It's outside of Houston. I think about 20 minutes west of |
| 1:19.5 | Houston. And it has this reputation as one of the first places that white people settled in Texas. |
| 1:30.2 | So the father of Texas, Stephen F. Austin, he picked the Sugarland area as the place where he would |
| 1:36.5 | presumably set up his homestead. He never really got around to that. But that's where the first white |
| 1:42.4 | settlers in Texas were. And so Sugarland really prides itself on its first colony roots. |
| 1:48.9 | And of course, as being the home of Imperial Sugar, which is a massive national sugar brand. |
| 1:55.2 | And that's where it's based, Sugarland. And the Imperial Sugar is going to be an important part |
| 2:01.8 | of the story we're going to hear in this podcast because the labor associated with this |
| 2:10.2 | came from something called convict leasing, right? Introduce convict leasing to people who have not |
| 2:16.0 | heard of this phrase. Well, they wouldn't be alone. I had not heard of convict leasing until |
| 2:21.7 | this cemetery, which we discussed in the podcast was discovered in 2018, even having grown up in |
... |
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