The board of a small Louisiana cemetery that refused to bury a black sheriff’s deputy held an emergency meeting Thursday and cut a provision for whites only from its sales contracts.
“When that meeting was over, it was like lifting a weight off me,” said H. Creig Vizena, president of Oaklin Springs Cemetery in southwest Louisiana, Thursday night.
He said he was baffled and embarrassed to learn two days earlier that the family of Allen Parish Sheriff’s deputy Darrell Semien, who died Sunday, had been told that he could not be buried in the Oberlin cemetery because he was African American. .
“It’s awful,” Vizena told The Associated Press on Thursday.
He said board members had removed the word “white” from a contract clause expressing “the right to burial of the remains of white people.”
Semien’s widow, Karla Semien, of Oberlin, told CBS Lafayette, Louisiana daughter KLFY-TV: “It was just a punch in the face, a punch in the gut. It was just belittling him. You know, we can do that.” It’s burying him because he’s black. “
She told the station that the family had met the woman who sold lots.
As she recalled to KLFY, “First me and one of my other sons got out of the car when she arrived, and he’s white, and she said she was sorry about our loss, and I said to her, ‘Thank you. And before I could say anything else, the rest 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 can’t sell you a lot.” ‘
KLFY-TV
“To be told this is as if we were nothing. He was nothing? He put his life on the line for them,” Semien told KPLC-TV on Wednesday.
“My father was not a man, he was a phenomenal man,” daughter Shayla Semien told KATC-TV. “He was a police officer in the same community for fifteen years. Because of the color of his skin, he was denied a berth.”
“I apologized and I still apologize … I’m so sorry this happened,” Vizena stressed to KLFY.
Despite the contract being signed by anyone buying a lot, Vizena told the station board members that they had never noticed it before.
“I’m sorry I don’t have a better explanation than 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 is right. “
Vizena said when he told other members about the language, everyone said it needed to be resolved.
The offensive wording was not in the cemetery association’s statutes, but only in sales contracts that have been used since the cemetery was established in the late 1950s, Vizena said.
People tend to sign such things without reading them, he said.
He said that a relative of his was the woman who told the family, and that she was “relieved of her duties.”
Vizena said he was on his way home on Tuesday when a deputy sheriff who knew Darrell Semien called to tell him about the rejection.
Vizena said he apologized to the family and offered one of his own lots in the small cemetery, which is estimated to cover less than two acres. But, he said, the offer was declined: The family said Semien, who was 55, could not rest there easily.
Vizena said he believes Oaklin could not be the only burial site with such segregationist remains. Cemetery associations in the south and the country should check their statutes and contracts for such language, he said.
“Folks, please go out and look at your cemetery statutes, ordinances in your cities, rules in your churches. Go out and clean it up.”
He told KLFY: “We can never change as a country until we erase all those things. We have no room for that.”
In front of Oaklin Springs Cemetery, he said, “It is a stain that will remain in our cemetery and our community for a long time to come.”
But he said, he thinks his grandkids will be able to say, “Hey, my papaya solved that.”