Louisiana cemetery told family of Black deputy he couldn’t be buried due to ‘whites only’ policy

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The family of a Black sheriff’s deputy in Louisiana said a local cemetery declined to bury his body after he died last week due to a “whites only” policy.

Darrell Semien, an Allen Parish sheriff’s office deputy, died on Sunday at the age of 55. But when his widow Karla went to inquire about his burial at the local Oaklin Springs cemetery, the Semien family said, she was told he couldn’t be buried there.

“I just went to Oaklin Springs cemetery to pick a plot for my husband to be buried . I met with the lady out there and she said she could not sell me a plot because the cemetery is a whites only cemetery,” Semien wrote in a Facebook post on Tuesday. “Wow what a slap in the face.”

Oaklin Springs cemetery confirmed to local station KPLC on Wednesday that a contract from the 1950s mentions “the right of burial of the remains of white human beings”.

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The cemetery is located in Allen Parish, Louisiana – where nearly a quarter of residents are Black.

The board president of the cemetery, H Creig Vizena, said he had been stunned to learn Semien was denied burial. “It’s horrible,” Vizena told the Associated Press.

Vizena told the news agency his 81-year-old aunt was the woman who denied the Semiens’ request, and she was “relieved of her duties”.

Vizena said he apologized to the family and offered one of his own plots in the small cemetery, which he estimated covers less than two acres (0.8 hectares). But, he said, the offer was turned down: the family said Semien couldn’t rest easily there.

“My dad wasn’t any man, he was a phenomenal man,” daughter Shayla Semien told local network KATC-TV. “He was a police officer in this same community for 15 years. He was denied a place to lay because of the color of his skin.”

It was common for cemeteries to enforce segregation into the late 1940s and 50s. In 2016, a cemetery in Normanna, Texas, was sued after Dorothy Barrera, who is white, discovered that the cemetery association would not allow her Latino husband’s burial. In 2014, the city of Waco, Texas, decided to remove a fence dividing the graves of white and Black people buried at the city-owned Greenwood cemetery.

The supreme court’s Shelley v Kraemer decision in 1948 outlawed racial covenants in real estate.

The Guardian could not reach Oaklin Springs cemetery to confirm details of the 1950s contract containing discriminatory language. Karla Semien did not immediately respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.

The Oaklin cemetery board voted on Thursday evening to remove the whites-only provision from its sales contracts, the AP reported.