When I first met him in 2016, Reginald Moore was deeply frustrated. The retired longshoreman had spent much of the previous two decades trying—without much success—to bring attention to the brutal convict leasing system that flourished in Fort Bend County in the second half of the nineteenth century. Deprived of slave labor after the Civil War, plantation owners across the South started “leasing” laborers from state prisons, which had filled up with black men thanks to discriminatory new laws known as the Black Codes. The convict laborers worked in conditions often worse than those under slavery, but city officials Moore spoke to largely ignored the system’s existence.Moore, who died of heart complications last week at the age of sixty, began researching convict leasing in Fort…The post Remembering Reginald Moore, the Activist Who Uncovered Sugar Land’s Dark Past appeared first on Texas Monthly.