The board of a small Louisiana cemetery that denied burial to a Black sheriff's deputy held an emergency meeting Thursday and removed a whites-only provision from its sales contracts.
"When that meeting was over it was like a weight lifted off of me," H. Creig Vizena, board president for Oaklin Springs Cemetery in southwest Louisiana, said Thursday night.
He said he was stunned and ashamed to learn two days earlier that the family of Allen Parish Sheriff's Deputy Darrell Semien, who died Sunday, had been told he could not be buried at the cemetery near Oberlin because he was African American.
"It's horrible," Vizena told The Associated Press Thursday.
He said the board members removed the word "white" from a contract stipulation conveying "the right of burial of the remains of white human beings."
Semien's widow, Karla Semien, of Oberlin, told CBS Lafayette, Louisiana affiliate KLFY-TV,"It was just so much a slap in the face, a punch in the gut. It was just belittling him. You know, that we can't bury him because he's black."
She told the station the family met with the woman who sold plots.
As she recalled to KLFY, "First me and one of my other sons got out of the car when she drove up, and he's white, and she said she was sorry for our loss, and I told her, 'Thank you.' And before I could say anything else, the rest of them started coming out of the car, and she looked at them, and then she looked at me and says, 'We're going to have to have a discrepancy.' She said, 'We're not going to be able to sell you a plot.'"
I could understand that old language was in the sales contract and long forgotten. Small local cemetery (not owned by one of the death conglomerates like SCI) that's used the same contract for years and no one noticed.
But someone did notice. And decided to try to enforce it rather than raise the alarm and change it.
-------------------------------- When the world wearies and society ceases to satisfy, there is always the garden - Minnie Aumônier
Posts: 38221 | Location: Somewhere in the middle | Registered: 19 January 2010
I have spent enough time in the South to know that that racist attitude is often so ingrained that racist people will insist that they are not racist others seem to be unaware that there is anything wrong with their racist actions and words. A relative of that sort knew that Paula Deen wanted to dress black men as slave servants for a party and could not understand why that would be racist.
-------------------------------- Several people have eaten my cooking and survived.
Posts: 25850 | Location: Still living at 9000 feet in the High Rockies of Colorado | Registered: 20 April 2005
Originally posted by Steve Miller: I've seen a lot of covenants like that on old property deeds. People forget they are there and they're not enforceable these days.
I'm not sure how title comapnies deal with them.
Given the court cases holding they cannot be enforced, I would be fine ignoring them.
Jf
-------------------------------- Be calm, be brave, it'll be okay.
Posts: 17731 | Location: Maine | Registered: 20 April 2005
