Editorials of The Times

Americans who grew up with the fiction that slavery was confined to the South — and that the North had always been “free” — learned differently in 1991, when construction workers stumbled upon the skeletal remains of more than 400 Africans at a site in New York City that has since been designated the African Burial Ground National Monument. The catalog of injuries etched into the bones of the men and women who labored to build, feed and protect colonial-era New York includes muscles so violently strained they were ripped away from the skeleton, offering a grisly portrait of what it was like to be worked to death in bondage.

A similar portrait is emerging in Sugar Land, Texas, a suburb southwest of Houston, where researchers are examining the remains of about 95 African-Americans whose unmarked graves were discovered this year. The dead are almost certainly victims of the second system of slavery that arose whens Southerners set out to circumvent the 13th Amendment of 1865, which outlawed involuntary servitude except as punishment for criminal conviction.

Those states imposed what the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Douglas Blackmon rightly describes as “Slavery by Another Name” — sweeping Negroes into custody for petty offenses like vagrancy, then turning them over to plantation owners and others who sometimes notified the local sheriff in advance of how much labor they needed. This practice, which persisted in various forms up to World War II, stripped African-Americans of the ability to accumulate wealth while holding them captive in dangerous, disease-ridden environs that killed many of them outright. The Sugar Land site offers present-day Americans a look at this shameful period from an unusual vantage point.

According to a 2004 study by the historian Amy Dase, the state began leasing inmates to private enterprises outside prisons in 1867 for construction of the roadbed along rail lines. Subsequent contracts hired out prisoners to chop and mill wood, mine coal and quarry stone. By the 1880s, more than a third of Texas’ inmates were engaged in 12 of the state’s 18 sugar plantations through a contract with two prominent businessmen who needed “a cheap labor supply that could be coerced much as slaves had been" to make sugar production profitable.

The Texas inmate population was whiter than in other Southern states, but owing to racist stereotypes, whites were given more favorable work assignments. African-Americans were typically assigned to swampy plantations where the dangerous, backbreaking occupation of chopping sugar cane often awaited them.

The plantations in Fort Bend County, where the lost graves were recently uncovered, were described as “low, mosquito infested swamp and the sluggish bayous [that] were habitats for alligators and noisome creepers. Convicts labored barelegged in wet sugar cane fields, dying like flies in the periodic epidemics of fevers.” Housing was poor, brutality rampant, and the annual mortality rate is said to have been 3 percent. To demark their suffering, inmates named the region the “Hell Hole on the Brazos” — a label that persists to this day.

The new graves were uncovered this year during the construction of a new school in Fort Bend County, where researchers believe the graveyard was used between 1878 and 1911. The timing suggests that some of those buried at the site are likely to have begun their lives in formalized slavery only to be ensnared in the successor system of bondage that Southern states expressly designed to replace it.

Scientists have found debilitating injuries reminiscent of New York’s African Burial Ground — including bone infections, healed breaks, bones distorted by heavy labor and muscles torn away from the skeleton. With close study, scientists should be able to discern what foods the inmates consumed and the diseases they suffered, providing a fuller portrait of the hell the state visited upon its black prison inmates in particular.

This graveyard’s relationship to the second enslavement of black Americans in the 19th century makes it a crucially important archaeological find, and the scientific team should take all the time it needs to analyze it. Beyond that, state and local officials are obligated to memorialize this site in a manner befitting its significance in the history of both Texas and the United States.

President Donald Trump’s spat with Omarosa Manigault Newman, the White House adviser who was fired in December for “serious integrity issues,” is another of those particularly Trumpian innovations in public life — the raging dumpster fire that continues to yield new trash.

In her juicy new tell-all, aptly titled “Unhinged,” Manigault Newman paints an unflattering portrait of the president, whom she has known since appearing as a contestant on his reality TV show “The Apprentice” in 2004. She characterizes Trump as a racist, misogynistic narcissist with poor impulse control, severe attention-deficit issues and signs of creeping mental decline, who “loves the hate,” “thrives on criticism and insults” and “delights in chaos and confusion.” Her anecdotes range from the prosaically awful (she claims he has used the N-word) to the freakish (she says she once walked into the Oval Office and found him eating paper). She says the Trump campaign offered her a $15,000-a-month sinecure to keep quiet about her on-the-job experiences. (A copy of the agreement has become public.) And, oh yes, she has secret audio recordings to corroborate some of her claims, including a recording of her firing by White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, in the Situation Room.

Trump has responded with characteristic restraint. He has dismissed Manigault Newman as “wacky”; called her a “lowlife”; mocked her for her having, he claims, weepily begged him for a job in the White House; and said she was “hated” by her colleagues for being “nasty,” “vicious, but not smart” and “nothing but problems.” Despite all this, insists Trump, he had tried his best to make things work because Manigault Newman always said “GREAT things” about him. For this president, there remains no higher job qualification than constantly telling him and others what a super guy he is.

On both sides, the spat is vintage Trump: tawdry, cruel, vindictive and highly personal. That said, this is about more than a petty feud with a former aide who famously shares Trump’s love of chaos, confusion and high drama. It is also a glaring reminder of one of this president’s central failings as a leader: his disastrous judgment when choosing people with whom to surround himself.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump ran as a savvy outsider who knew how to get things done. His leadership acumen and gut instincts would enable him to hire all “the best people” to help him run the country. The approach had worked in real estate. It was the core conceit of “The Apprentice.” What could possibly go wrong?

As it turns out, everything. As observers of real life as opposed to scripted television might have foreseen, Trump has proved wildly incompetent when it comes to matters of personnel. And while this occasionally results in some entertaining face plants, his failure has potentially serious repercussions for the nation.

Take the case of Manigault Newman. In addition to whatever self-serving mischief she may have wrought during her time as a highly paid presidential adviser, she liked to make surreptitious recordings of private conversations, even in secure areas of the White House where personal recording devices are strictly prohibited. No matter how Manigault Newman may feel about this administration and its lack of truthfulness, compromising national security in order to cover one’s backside is still a no-no.

Of course, in terms of self-serving machinations, Manigault Newman is bush league compared with former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. The laundry list of reckless, venal and quite possibly felonious behavior in which Manafort engaged has been on vivid display this month in federal court, where he is facing 18 counts of tax evasion and bank fraud. As ethically suspect characters go, Manafort ranks right up there with, well, with Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and longtime fixer, who is under criminal investigation for his own suspect business dealings. Cohen had worked with Trump for years. Even so, when it came to light that Cohen had secretly recorded some of their conversations, the president took to Twitter to rage, “What kind of a lawyer would tape a client?”

Answer: Precisely the kind whose primary client would be Donald Trump.

Even if you grade on the Trumpian curve of loyalty matters above all else, Trump has repeatedly failed. These people are all grifters. Trump just assumed they were his grifters.

And all of that is before you start poking into the shady dealings of other members of the Trump syndicate. Going back to the earliest days of the administration, Trump tapped Michael Flynn as his national security adviser, despite an explicit warning from President Barack Obama, who’d had to fire Flynn from his administration. This year, Trump nominated White House physician Dr. Ronny Jackson to head the Department of Veterans Affairs, only to have Jackson withdraw after allegations came to light that, among other issues, he had a tendency to get drunk on the job and hand out meds like Halloween candy. In July, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Scott Pruitt, (finally!) got shown the door for his industrial-grade grifting. Just this past week, the news broke that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has been accused of stealing upward of $120 million from various business associates. And so grows the spiral of corruption and incompetence and ethical shadiness.

Surrounding oneself with smart, competent, preferably noncorrupt people is important for any president. The job is too big for even the most gifted leader to handle alone. But for a president with no relevant experience in, knowledge of or identifiable interest in what the job entails, it is all the more vital. Unfortunately, Trump’s claim that he has a keen eye for talent, like so many of his other promises, turned out to be a mix of alternative facts and hot air.