But, hey, it’s okay. If the family really and truly wanted him to be buried there, they could request the cemetery board to approve putting the “remains of the non-white human being” in their pristine delicate ground.
The board did have an emergency meeting to change the contract’s wording, and apparently they’ve “relieved someone of their duties” for presenting the contract to the bereaved non-white family in the first place. Note that it’s “relieved of duties” implying not fired but shifted to some other duties.
Come on! The struggle for Civil Rights should not still be fought 53 years after the purported end of the Civil Rights movement (1968). This story is appalling and highlights stupendous stupidity and bald bigotry.
It occurs to me those assholes can not do anything that will remove that stain from their precious burial ground. And what does the board president have to say about it?
It’s a stain that’s going to be on our cemetery and our community for a long time.
The entire fucking board should’ve quit, but first fired the corporate lawyer and whoever else was or should’ve been involved in the last fucking half century and change in running the damn place.
The seriously appalling part, IMHO, is not only that the cemetery has some leftover racist wording in the fine print of its contracts that nobody’s got around to changing in however many decades, but that a current employee of the cemetery explicitly invoked that wording to a bereaved black family seeking to obtain a burial plot.
That’s not just “we are idiots who can’t be bothered to keep our business’s contractual clauses up to date after more than a half-century”. That’s more “we are racists who are terribly, terribly sorry that our racism is now on public view and embarrassing us”.
Do you want poltergeists? Because that’s how you get poltergeists.
Also: fuck those racist assholes. As noted, there’s a difference between “we forgot to update a long-obsolete clause in the fine print we’d forgotten about” and “We knew damn well it was there and were fine with it up to now.”