Segregation After Death

A casket had just been lowered into a freshly dug grave at White Chapel Memorial Cemetery in suburban Detroit one day last week when a cemetery official scurried up to the graveside. "This burial must stop!" he cried.

The trouble was that the dead man, a George Vincent Nash, was an Indian, and White Chapel is "restricted to members of the Caucasian race." White Chapel officials insisted on sticking to the letter of the rule, even though Nash's wife, only part Indian, had been buried in the adjoining lot back in 1949. Sniffed E. Reed Hunt, president of a cemetery association that includes White Chapel: "If we made an exception in this case, some 40,000 plot owners would be able to take action against the cemetery because they paid for the restriction."

After several other Detroit cemeteries refused Nash's body, the American Legion took responsibility for him, as a veteran of World War I, and buried him at the Legion's Perry Mount cemetery with color-guard honors. Legion officials promised Nash's children that their mother's remains would be removed from segregated White Chapel and reburied beside her husband at Perry Mount.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.