The Law: 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...

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