The board of a small Louisiana cemetery that denied burying an adjunct of a black sheriff held an emergency meeting Thursday and withdrew an exclusive white disposition from its sales contracts.
“When that meeting ended it was as if I had been raised,” H. Creig Vizena, chairman of the board of Oaklin Springs Cemetery in southwest Louisiana, said Thursday night.
He said he was stunned and embarrassed to learn two days before they had told the family of Allen Parish Sheriff’s Deputy Darrell Semien, who died Sunday that he could not be buried in the cemetery near Oberlin because it was African American.
“It’s horrible,” Vizena told The Associated Press on Thursday.
He said board members removed the word “white” from a stipulation in the contract that conveyed “the right to the burial of the remains of white human beings.”
Semien’s widow, Karla Semien of Oberlin, told CBS Lafayette, Louisiana-affiliated KLFY-TV, “It was so much a slap in the face, a punch in the gut. It just belittled him. You know, we can “not bury it because it’s black.”
He told the station that the family met with the woman who was selling plots.
As he reminded KLFY, “First me and one of my other kids got out of the car when he got in and he was white, and he said he felt our loss and I said,‘ Thank you. ’And before I could say anything plus, the rest started getting out of the car, and she looked at them, then looked at me and said, “We’re going to have to have a discrepancy.” She said, “We can’t sell you a plot.”
KLFY-TV
“Let them tell us it’s like we’re nothing. He was nothing? He put his life at his disposal,” Semien remarked on KPLC-TV on Wednesday.
“My father was no man, he was a phenomenal man,” his daughter Shayla Semien told KATC-TV. “He was a police officer in that same community for 15 years. He was denied a place to put it because of the color of his skin.”
“I apologized and I still apologize. … I am very sorry for this to happen,” Vizena stressed to KLFY.
Although the contract is signed by everyone who buys a plot, Vizena told members of the station’s cemetery board that they had never noticed.
“I’m sorry I don’t have a better explanation than that,” he said, adding, “I can’t answer a question I don’t know the answer to. I refuse to speculate on it. I just know it was wrong and now it’s well “.
Vizena said that when he spoke the language to other members, everyone said it had to be fixed.
The offensive wording was not in the cemetery association statutes, but only in the 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 a relative of his was the woman who told the family and was “relieved of his duties.”
Vizena said he was leaving his home on Tuesday when a deputy he had met Darrell Semien called to inform him of the rejection.
Vizena said he apologized to the family and offered one of his own plots to the small cemetery, which he estimated covers less than two acres. But, he said, the offer was turned down: the family said Semien, who was 55, could not rest easy there.
Vizena said he believes Oaklin could not have been the only cemetery with these segregationist remains. Cemetery associations across the south and the country should review their statutes and contracts for that language, he said.
“People, please go out and look at the statutes of your cemetery, the ordinances of your cities, the rules of your churches. Go out and clean them.”
He told KLFY: “We can never change country until we eliminate all these things. We have no space there.”
For Oaklin Springs Cemetery, he said, “It’s a stain that will be 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 leg fixed it.”