UNSHACKLING HISTORY: CONVICT LEASING CAMPS IN SUGAR LAND, TX
PANEL DISCUSSION
Join DiverseWorks and the African American Library at the Gregory School on Thursday, October 21 at 6:30 pm for this virtual event, presented in conjunction with artist Candice D’Meza’s forthcoming project, WAIL.
REGISTER HERE
Leading the discussion with Candice D’Meza will be esteemed panelists Dr. Naomi Reed, Mr. Sam Collins III and Dr. Theresa Jach who will each explore topics such as acknowledging history as part of a contemporary conversation, creating change through ancestral work, and the need for community healing around sites of trauma. The goal is to provide context and increased understanding of the sites of the state-sanctioned convict leasing camps sites in Sugar Land (active from 1877 – 1912) and the aforementioned themes, connecting Houston history to the vestiges of slavery and forced labor that have not only shaped our country but the world.
PARTICIPANTS
Samuel Collins, III is a historian and founding member of The Bryan Museum’s Delegados Advocate Board, which was formed in 2017. The Delegados are a group of mid-career professionals with a passion for the Museum and the history it represents and who come together to share their time, talent, and network to help promote and support the Museum. Sam serves on several other boards including National Trust for Historic Preservation, Rosenberg Library Trustees, and the Ruby Bridges Foundation (National Board). His past board service includes Galveston Historical Foundation, Old Central Cultural Center, NIA Cultural Center, Galveston Chamber of Commerce, Galveston Economic Development Partnership, Texas Historical Commission State Board of Review, and Texas A & M University Letterman’s association.
Candice D’Meza is a mother of two, actor, writer, filmmaker, and multidisciplinary artist whose writing and acting work has been featured in American Theatre Magazine, The Acentos Review, The Houston Chronicle, Houstonia, and The Houston Press. D’Meza’s ongoing work, 30 WAYS TO GET FREE, is a series of micro-plays that explore, via sci-fi, African folklore, Afrofuturism, magical surrealism, and speculative fiction, the unlimited ways that Black people across the African Diaspora may triumphantly enter into a free world of their own imagining. To date, selected pieces have been published in The Acentos Review, produced as commissioned plays by the Latinx Playwrights Circle in New York, and produced as short films by The Catastrophic Theatre.
Dr. Theresa Jach is an award-winning professor of history at HCC Northwest College. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Houston and has served on local advisory committees related to the Sugar Land 95. She is the co-author and editor of Incarcerated Women: A History of Struggle, Oppression, and Resistance in American Prisons (Lexington Books/Rowman & Littlefield, 2017) She currently lives in Richmond, Texas where she has been a member of the community since 2009.
Dr. Naomi Reed is a sociocultural anthropologist who explores the relationship between white racial epistemology and conceptualizations of Blackness in historical memory. She is interested in how US history curricula impacts elite white high school students’ understanding of local and global Blackness in opposition to their own identities. Her recent work is a critical cultural heritage project that considers how Sugar Land, Texas memorializes the Black lives lost to convict leasing at the Imperial Sugar Factory. Reed currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Southwestern University, Georgetown, TX. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology and African Diaspora Studies from The University of Texas at Austin.
The African American Library at the Gregory School officially opened on Saturday, November 14, 2009. It is housed in the Edgar M. Gregory School, which served as the first public school for African Americans in Houston. As the first library of its kind in Houston and one of the few African American libraries in the country, the Gregory School serves as a resource to preserve, promote, and celebrate the rich history and culture of African Americans in Houston, the surrounding region, and the African Diaspora.