The board of directors of a small Louisiana cemetery that did not bury a deputy black sheriff’s funeral held an emergency meeting on Thursday and a provision that was removed from his sales contracts only for whites.
“When the meeting was over, it was like a weight being lifted from me,” H. Creig Vizena, executive president of Oaklin Springs Cemetery in southwest Louisiana, said Thursday night.
He said he was stunned and ashamed to hear two days earlier that the family of Deputy Darrell Semien, Deputy Darrell Semien of Allen Parish, who died Sunday, had been told he could not be buried at the cemetery near Oberlin because he Was African-American.
“It’s awful,” Vizena told The Associated Press on Thursday.
He said councilors had removed the word ‘white’ from a contract clause transferring ‘the funeral rights of the remains of white people’.
Semien’s widow, Karla Semien, of Oberlin, told CBS Lafayette, a subsidiary of KLFY-TV: ‘It was just so much a slap in the face, a fist in the gut. It just belittled him. You know we can bury him because he’s black. ‘
She told the station the family met the woman who sold plots.
While reminding KLFY: ‘First, one of my other boys and I got out of the car when she drove up, and he’s white, and she said she was sorry for our loss, and I told her,’ Thank you. “And before I could say anything else, the rest of the car started coming out, and she looked at them, and then she looked at me and said, ‘We’ll have to make a difference.’ She said: “We can not sell you a plot of land.”
KLFY-TV
“To tell them it’s like we were nothing. He was nothing? He risked his life for them,” Semien told KPLC-TV on Wednesday.
“My father was not a man, he was a phenomenal man,” Shayla Semien, daughter, told KATC-TV. “He was a police officer in the same community for 15 years. He did not get a place to lie down because of the color of his skin.”
‘I apologized and still apologize. “I’m so sorry it happened,” Vizena told KLFY.
Despite the contract signed by everyone buying a plot, Vizena told the station’s cemetery that they had never noticed it.
“I’m sorry I have no better explanation for that,” he said, adding, “I can not answer a question to which I do not know the answer. I refuse to speculate about it. I just know it was wrong and now it’s right. ‘
Vizena said when he told other members of the language, everyone said it needed to be corrected.
The offensive wording was not in the cemetery association’s ordinances, but only in sales contracts used since the cemetery was created in the late 1950s, Vizena said.
People tend to draw such things without reading them, he said.
He said 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 from work on Tuesday when a deputy who knew Darrell Semien called to tell him about the rejection.
Vizena said he apologized to the family and offered one of his own plots in the small cemetery, which he said covers less than two acres. But according to him, the offer was rejected: the family said that Semien, who was 55, could not easily rest there.
Vizena said he believes Oaklin could not be the only cemetery with such segregation residents. Cemetery associations across the South and the country should review their ordinances and contracts for such language, he said.
“People, please go out and look at your ordinances at cemeteries, ordinances in your villages, rules in your churches. Go out there and clean it.”
He told KLFY: “We can never change as a country before we wipe out all that. We have no room for that.”
For Oaklin Springs Cemetery, he said, “This is a stain that will be on our cemetery and our community for a long time to come.”
But he said, he thinks his grandchildren will be able to say, “Hey, my pawpaw fixed it.”