This Man Is a Hero

From sun up to sun down, convicts who were leased by the state to plantation owners toiled in the fields chopping sugar cane sometimes until they "dropped dead in their tracks," as the State Convention of Colored Men of Texas complained in 1883.

In modern-day Sugar Land it was all easy to forget-but not for one man named Reggie Moore, who couldn't stop thinking about it.

Moore started researching Sugar Land's slavery and convict-leasing history after spending time working as a prison guard at one of Texas's oldest prisons, but his curiosity evolved into obsession. He had a hunch. Based on what he learned, he believed that the bodies of former slaves and black prisoners were still buried in Sugar Land's backyard. He focused his attention on a site called the Imperial State Prison Farm, the one that bore the name of the country's premier sugar company.

For 19 years he searched for their bodies, stopping just short of sticking a shovel in the dirt himself.

"I felt like I had to be a voice for the voiceless," said Moore, who is African American.

This week, his quest produced results.

At the former Imperial State Prison Farm site, archaeologists have unearthed an entire plot of precise rectangular graves for 95 souls, each buried 2 to 5 feet beneath the soil in nearly disintegrated pinewood caskets. The 19th century cemetery was unmarked, with no vestige of its existence visible from the surface.

The convict-leasing system proliferated all across the south in the late 19th century and into the 20th, overwhelmingly targeting black Americans picked up for offenses such as vagrancy, flirting with white women or petty theft, as historian Douglas A. Blackmon reported in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "Slavery By Another Name." The prisoners were then leased by the state to private businessmen and forced to work on plantations, in coal mines and railroads or other state projects - such as building the entire Texas Capitol building from scratch.

Moore said the discovery of the 95 graves has been gratifying after so many years of being the sole advocate for the nameless former slaves and convicts. He has since held memorial ceremonies for them at the Imperial cemetery, calling himself their "spokesman."

"It was just overwhelming," Moore said of the discovery of the graves. "And then sad at the same time, because now I know these guys are here. This really did happen."

Two weeks ago, he went to the site of the graves to see the bodies. He had to steady himself as he walked up to them, he said, because he felt like he was going to faint. He knew they were dead but for some reason as he looked at their skeletons they seemed more alive than ever, like he really knew them.

Men who, like Governor Tillman, start the ball of lynch law rolling for a certain crime, are powerless to stop it when drunken or criminal white toughs feel like hanging an Afro-American on any pretext. Even to the better class of Afro-Americans the crime of rape is so revolting they have too often taken the white man's word and given lynch law neither the investigation nor condemnation it deserved. They forget that a concession of the right to lynch a man for a certain crime, not only concedes the right to lynch any person for any crime, but (so frequently is the cry of rape now raised) it is in a fair way to stamp us a race of rapists and desperadoes. They have gone on hoping and believing that general education and financial strength would solve the difficulty, and are devoting their energies to the accumulation of both.

The mob spirit has grown with the increasing intelligence of the Afro-American. It has left the out-of-the-way places where ignorance prevails, has thrown off the mask and with this new cry stalks in broad daylight in large cities, the centers of civilization, and is encouraged by the "leading citizens" and the press.

Moons close to Jupiter tend to orbit in a “prograde” motion, meaning in the same direction as Jupiter’s rotation. Those farther away rotate in a retrograde motion. But Valetudo is an odd duck. It’s orbiting in a prograde motion in the retrograde region.

“It’s like driving down the highway the wrong way,” Sheppard says. “It’s going around Jupiter in one direction, and there’s, like, 40-something objects going around Jupiter in the other direction.” This means it’s “very likely to have some sort of head-on collision over time,” he says.

And that’s actually an important clue to why there are so many moons around Jupiter. Sheppard explains that a long time ago, there were probably fewer, larger moons orbiting Jupiter in this retrograde region. But over time, they were broken into pieces.

It’s possible that Valetudo-or a larger previous version of it-was the destructive force behind the collision. Imagine the chaos that would ensue if a tractor-trailer was driving against traffic on a highway; that’s Valetudo. And that possibly “gives us this whole swarm of objects we see today,” Sheppard says.

Workmen found the black granite tomb this month during construction of an apartment building in the historic Mediterranean port city of Alexandria.

The 30-tonne coffin, the largest yet found in Alexandria, prompted a swirl of theories in local and international media that it may be the resting place of the ancient Macedonian ruler, who founded the city that still bears his name in 331 BC.

Egypt's antiquities ministry had vigorously dismissed the chances of finding Alexander's remains inside the 2,000-year-old sarcophagus, and on Thursday its scepticism was vindicated.

"We found the bones of three people, in what looks like a family burial. Unfortunately, the mummies inside were not in the best condition and only the bones remain," Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said.

Mr Waziri said some of the remains had disintegrated because sewage water from a nearby building had leaked into the sarcophagus through a small crack in one of the sides.

The ankylosaurid fossil, known as Akainacephalus johnsoni, is now on exhibit in the National History Museum of Utah in Salt Lake City.

The genus name essentially means "spike head," but the species name is in honor of museum volunteer Randy Johnson, a retired chemist who helped prepare the skull.

"I never thought that I would have the opportunity to actually work on fossils that could be important for paleontologists," Johnson said in a statement. "Now that I'm a museum volunteer, I'm getting the opportunity to work on a large variety of fossils and consult with top paleontologists-it's like a dream second career. I couldn't believe it when they told me they are naming the ankylosaur after me, a once in a lifetime honor."

The ankylosaurid fossils associated with North America had smooth bony armor on their skulls. This one had pronounced spiky, bony armor covering the skull and snout, closely related to Asian ankylosaurids that lived 125 million years ago.

"A reasonable hypothesis would be that ankylosaurids from Utah are related to those found elsewhere in western North America, so we were really surprised to discover that Akainacephalus was so closely related to species from Asia," said Randall Irmis, co-author of the study and curator of paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Utah, said in a statement.

The fossil helped the researchers determine that at least two immigration events occurred during the Late Cretaceous period, resulting in two groups of ankylosaurid dinosaurs.

Pretty sure the legislative money spigot would be wide open if the bill was just called the Election Reform and Efficiency Cutting of Taxes ("ERECT") Act.