CEMETERIES
The early Civil Rights Bills of New York, Florida, and Kansas prohibited race distinctions in public cemeteries. This stipulation, however, does not appear in the present statutes of any of the States, except Kansas. Race distinctions in cemeteries are common. The legislature of Mississippi[[291]] of 1900, for instance, gave the Ladies’ Auxiliary Cemetery Association, an organization of white women, permission to remove the monument and remains of the Negro State Secretary of State, James Lynch, from the white to the Negro cemetery in Jackson, Mississippi, provided it was done without expense to the State.
The Raleigh, N. C., News and Observer of February 20, 1906, quotes the Germantown, Pa., Guide as calling on the people to provide a cemetery where Negroes may be buried, saying that “unless something is done, the bodies of the colored poor will be denied the right of decent burial, for their disposal, of necessity, will be by means of the dissecting rooms of anatomical boards.”
The Civil Rights Bills of the eighteen States have now been analyzed, and the judicial decisions arising therefrom have been considered. It is noticeable that, if one excepts the theatre cases of the Reconstruction period, not a case has come from a Southern State. The explanation must be that those States have never undertaken to require hotel-keepers, etc., to offer accommodations without regard to color: the Negroes have taken for granted that they would not be admitted to such places, except upon condition that they would accept the accommodations set apart for their race, and consequently have not applied for admission upon any other terms. In the other States the courts have, as a rule, interpreted the Civil Rights Bills very strictly. If a place is not specifically mentioned in the statute, courts have been very slow to include it under the general head of “other places of amusement or accommodation.” In other words, this phrase, which is, in substance, tacked on to every statute, is a dead letter. The courts are chary, as they should be, of invading individual liberty and freedom of business. But if a place is specifically mentioned in the statute, the law is not satisfied by offering separate accommodations to Negroes, even though such accommodations are equal for both races in every respect; they must be identical.