The board of a small Louisiana cemetery that denied burial to a black sheriff held an emergency meeting on Thursday and removed an exclusive white clause from its sales contracts.
“When that meeting ended, it was as if a weight had been lifted from me,” said H. Creig Vizena, chairman of the Oaklin Springs Cemetery in southwest Louisiana, Thursday night.
He said he was shocked and ashamed to learn, two days earlier, that the family of Allen’s parish deputy sheriff, Darrell Semien, who died on Sunday, was told that he could not be buried in the cemetery near Oberlin because he he was African American.
“It sucks,” Vizena told the Associated Press on Thursday.
He said the board members removed the word “white” from a contractual clause that conveyed “the right to bury the remains of white human beings”.
Semien’s widow, Karla Semien of Oberlin, told CBS Lafayette, an affiliate of KLFY-TV in Louisiana: “It was just a slap in the face, a punch in the stomach. It was just a depreciation of him. You know, we can” bury him because he is black. “
She told the station that the family met the woman who sold lots.
As she reminded KLFY: “First me and one of my other children got out of the car when she arrived, and he is white, and she said she was sorry for our loss, and I said to her, ‘Thank you’. And before I could say anything else, the rest of them started to get out of the car, and she looked at them, and then she looked at me and said, ‘We’re going to have to have a discrepancy.’ She said: ‘We will not be able to sell you a lot.’ “
KLFY-TV
“Hearing this is like we were nothing. Was he nothing? He put his life on the line for them,” Semien told KPLC-TV on Wednesday.
“My father was not just any man, he was a phenomenal man,” daughter Shayla Semien told KATC-TV. “He was a police officer in the same community for 15 years. He didn’t get a place to lie down because of his skin color.”
“I apologized and I’m still apologizing … I’m very sorry that this happened,” emphasized Vizena to KLFY.
Despite the contract being signed by everyone who buys land, Vizena told members of the station’s cemetery council that they had never noticed it before.
“I’m sorry, but I have no better explanation for that,” he said, adding, “I can’t answer a question to which I don’t know the answer. I refuse to speculate about it. I just know it was wrong and now it’s right . “
Vizena said that when she told other members about the language, each said it needed to be fixed.
The offensive wording was not in the statute of the cemetery association, but only in sales contracts used since the cemetery was created in the late 1950s, Vizena said.
People tend to sign these things without reading them, he said.
He said that a relative of his was the woman who told the family and that she was “released from her duties”.
Vizena said she was returning home from work on Tuesday when a deputy who knew Darrell Semien called to inform him of the rejection.
Vizena said she apologized to the family and offered one of her own plots in the small cemetery, which she estimated to cover less than two hectares. But, he said, the offer was declined: the family said Semien, 55, could not easily rest there.
Vizena said she believed that Oaklin could not have been the only cemetery with such segregationist remnants. Cemetery associations across the South and across the country should check their statutes and contracts for such language, he said.
“Guys, please go out and look at the status of your cemetery, the laws in your cities, the rules in your churches. Go there and clean this up.”
He told KLFY: “We can never change as a country until we eliminate all these things. We have no room for that.”
For the Oaklin Springs cemetery, he said, “It is a stain that will remain in our cemetery and in our community for a long time.”
But he said he thinks his grandchildren will be able to say, “Hey, my pawpaw fixed that.”