Segregated even in death

Max Whittaker for The New York Times - For decades, remains that were moved from the Gold Rush-era Negro Hill Cemetery were buried under headstones with a racial epithet.

Wedged between a strawberry patch and an encroaching swath of suburbia, the men and women who lie in the Mormon Island Relocation Cemetery are a long-dead, little-noted lot: a Mr. Outen, for example, who died in December 1862, or Elizabeth, the wife of James, who died in April some two decades later. But for the better part of five decades, the most notable tombstones at Mormon Island were those without names: 36 anonymous decedents whose grave markers shared a single, shocking label: “Moved from Nigger Hill Cemetery.”

Perhaps more jarring were the words that followed, saying that the headstones were placed “by U.S. Government” in 1954.

There is an explanation, albeit a tortured one. In the early 1950s, the United States Army Corps of Engineers was charged with relocating hundreds of graves from cemeteries due to be submerged by the creation of Folsom Lake, which was formed by a dam about 25 miles northeast of Sacramento. And one of those was a Gold Rush-era town known as Negro Hill.

Negro Hill Burial Ground Project


momentum for switching the stones really began to build only in 2009, when Josh Michael, a local Boy Scout, drafted an elaborate proposal to replace the markers to fulfill his community service obligation for becoming an Eagle Scout. Josh, now 15, was unavailable for comment because he was — no kidding — climbing Mount Kilimanjaro.