A Louisiana cemetery told the family of a black deputy sheriff that he could not be buried there because it was only for whites

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Her husband Darrell Semien, a sheriff’s deputy for Allen Parish, Louisiana, died on Jan. 24 after being diagnosed with cancer in December, CNN’s KPLC reported.

Semien went to Oaklin Springs Cemetery in Oberlin earlier this week to inquire if she had left her husband there. But a woman in the cemetery turned her away because her husband was African American.

“I met the lady out there and she said she could NOT sell me a lot because the cemetery is a WHITES ONLY cemetery,” Semien wrote on Facebook. She even had paperwork on a clipboard showing me that only white people can be buried there. She stood in front of me and all my children. Wow what a slap in the face. ‘

CNN has contacted Semien for comment.

Creig Vizena, president of the Oaklin Springs Cemetery Association, told CNN subsidiary KATC he was embarrassed to learn how the Semien family had been treated. The woman who sent them away was in her 80s and has since been “relieved of her duties,” he told the Washington Post.

CNN was unable to reach Vizena for comment.

Vizena told KPLC that he was not aware of the language in the cemetery’s sales contracts, which date back to the 1950s and include the phrase “the right to burial of the remains of white people.” The issue had not been raised before, he said.

“I take full responsibility for that,” Vizena told KPLC. ‘I have been chairman of this board for a number of years now. I take full responsibility for not reading the statutes. ‘

Board members of the cemetery held an emergency meeting on Thursday to remove the clause from the contract, KPLC reported.

Oaklin Springs Cemetery in Oberlin, Louisiana.

Vizena apologized, saying he had offered the family one of the lots he owns so that Darrell Semien could be buried there. But the damage was done and they refused.

Segregated cemeteries have a long history in the US, and remnants of those dark chapters remain to this day.

In 2016, the city of Waco, Texas, ordered the removal of a chain-link fence from a public cemetery used to separate the white portion from the black portion. A similar fence in a cemetery in Mineola, Texas, came down last year.

The Louisiana ACLU urged the Oaklin Springs Cemetery Association to remove all references to “whites only” from its statutes, citing the 1948 Supreme Court decision in Shelley v. Kraemer, banning race covenants in housing.

“It is unscrupulous and unacceptable that the Semien family – or anyone else – faces such blatant racial discrimination, especially at a time of grief and grief,” the organization wrote in a letter.

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