Integrating the Graveyard

Racial discrimination persists in death as well as life. Many private cemeteries in both the North and South make contracts with their customers that contain racial restrictions specifying who shall be buried where. Last week, however, a U.S. district court in Alabama toppled such monuments to segregation when it ordered an all-white Birmingham cemetery to accept the body of Bill Henry Terry Jr., a Negro Army private.

Before going to Viet Nam last March, Terry, 20, told his wife that when he died he wanted to be buried in Elmwood Cemetery, which is near his childhood home. Terry Was cut down on a search-and-destroy mission last July. When Elmwood rejected his family's application for a plot, he was temporarily interred in one of Birmingham's black cemeteries. In his decision, Federal Judge Seybourn Lynne cited a Supreme Court ruling last month that desegregated a neighborhood-owned swimming club in Fairfax County, Va. (TIME, Dec. 26). Both cases, said Lynne, provide examples of restrictive covenants that were outlawed by the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Thus, more than a century after the Civil War, Elmwood will have a black soldier resting alongside the whites who died defending slavery (among other things) in the Confederacy.

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