(soft music)
♪
(narrator) 35 miles southeast of Baton Rouge
on the banks of the mighty Mississippi
sits Convent, Louisiana,
a town in the heart of plantation country.
(Oliver) There are hundreds of plantations
that were located up and down the Mississippi River
between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
Many of those properties now have industrial facilities
located on them.
(narrator) Among them, refineries belonging
to Shell Oil Company.
In the midst of sugar cane fields
sits Shell's Convent refinery on 4400 acres of land.
It is here that preliminary plans
for a new facility were suddenly halted.
(Oliver) We had no idea what they had discovered
or what work had been done until after the project was cancelled.
(narrator) Shell received an archeological report
that revealed a grisly discovery:
an unmarked graveyard containing the bodies
of more than a thousand slaves.
Word traveled fast.
(Kathe) If there were so many plantations,
where are all of the graves of the people who died,
lived, and worked here?
(narrator) Kathe Hambrick,
founder of the River Road African American Museum,
was about to find out.
(Kathe) One of the archaeologists, Dave Port,
came to see me and he told me about the discovery
of the cemeteries that were here
in the sugar cane fields just adjacent to Tezcuco.
♪
(narrator) Tezcuco, a magnificent plantation
that once stood proudly
on the East River Road of the Mississippi.
Destroyed by fire in 2002,
the ruins sit on Shell's property
in the shadow of the refinery and those sugar cane fields,
now giving up secrets held for more than a hundred years,
not one but two unmarked cemeteries,
eternal resting places for some 1400 slaves.
(Thurston) Finding out you have a cemetery that you can't do anything with
could be a real monkey wrench in your plans.
You can understand why they may not be excited by that.
In Shell's case, they just took responsibility for it.
(narrator) Upon discovery, Shell made the decision
to not only mark the hallowed ground but to memorialize it,
the first step in reconciling the plantation's past.
♪
The slaves had been packed into shallow graves,
one against the other.
(Thurston) When we began probing,
we found that there was another layer underneath them.
In some cases it seemed like there was a third layer.
(narrator) Most likely so the plantation owner
wouldn't have to use more land.
About half a mile away at the other cemetery,
the bodies appear to be buried in a more traditional manner.
(Thurston) Unlike Monroe, there are no trees there.
It is literally a sugar cane field.
And you can stand there and you have no clue
that it's any different than anywhere else out there.
(narrator) But now that we know, we can never forget.
(singing)
(Hugues) We are here today to unveil
the Bruslie and Monroe Cemeteries.
This is the day where we're gonna pay them respect
and give them the right of human dignity
that they did not enjoy during their living times.
(lively music)
♪
There was one headstone that was found here,
and the name on that headstone
was M.K. Mitchell.
(Thurston) If you knew that your ancestor lived on this plantation
before or after the Civil War,
and they died,
there's a good chance that they're buried there.
And this affords them the opportunity
to go visit their ancestors.
(Hugues) It was a pretty natural decision that something needed to be done
to protect, to preserve, and to bring some respect
to the people who are interred.
(soft music)
(Kathe) This is a discovery
about the memory of our pain as a country,
and we owe it to the people who are buried
in all of the unmarked burial grounds of former plantations
to create a place in their memory
where we can all come together
and heal ourselves from this pain.
♪