A cemetery in Louisiana told the family of a man who died of bladder cancer a plot in the graveyard because the man was black, the Washington Post reports.
Darrell Semien, a 55-year-old sheriff’s deputy, died Sunday after fighting bladder cancer. He wanted to be buried near their home in Oberlin, Louisiana, about 100 miles of Baton Rouge and near his workplace at the sheriff’s office. At the suggestion of his coworkers at the Allen Parish Sheriff’s Office, his wife and seven children found a spot at Oaklin Springs Baptist Cemetery, a graveyard surrounded by trees, that met his wishes.
When his widow, Karla, inquired about a grave site, the caretaker of the site told her bluntly, “Oh, we’re going to have a dispute. We can’t sell you a plot,” Semien recalled the woman saying. “This is a Whites-only cemetery. There are no coloreds here.”
“Are you joking?” she remembered asking the overseer as one of her children burst out in tears. “I couldn’t believe I was even hearing the words she said.”
Established in the 1950s when segregation was the rule in Louisiana, Oaklin Springs Baptist Cemetery never removed its rule that it was for “the remains of white human beings.” from the books and had apparently been enforcing it since its founding.
H. Creig Vizena, the president of the cemetery’s board, told The Post he was shocked and ashamed to learn that Semien had been denied a plot at the gravesite due to his race. “I truly hate that all this has happened,” he said in an interview. “It’s a sad week in this community, and fixing it as fast as we could is not going to make it any less sad.”
Karla Semien, who is white, told the Post, “He was good enough to protect you, being a police officer of all these years, but he wasn’t good enough to be laid to rest in your cemetery?”
According to the Post, on Tuesday evening, Vizena paid the Semiens a visit in person, offering an apology on behalf of the cemetery. He said the site’s overseer, who is in her 80s, had been “relieved of her duties.” And he offered to give them a free burial plot for Darrell, bypassing the need for a contract for Whites only. She declined the offer.