Prejudice in California? Really?

Jesse McKinley has an article in The New York Times about bad racial behavior in Gold Rush-era California:

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 of 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: three dozen 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 the U.S. Government in 1954.
“This is something you wouldn’t believe, not in this day and time,” said Ralph L. White, an African-American businessman and former city councilman in Stockton in nearby San Joaquin County. “When I went up to that gravesite, I feel like I could feel the presence of those people crying to get those things off of them.”
That pleading, and that of a group of living activists, including a Boy Scout, was answered this week when crews from El Dorado County removed the 36 headstones. Their removal came after a unanimous decision last month from an embarrassed board of supervisors, as well as the theft of two of the offensive markers earlier this week. “There’s no acceptable explanation,” said John Knight, a county supervisor who said he had learned of the markers only this year. “It’s not indicative of the county. It’s just one of those oversights that a lot of people didn’t know about it.”
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 twenty-five miles northeast of Sacramento. And one of those was a Gold Rush-era town known as Negro Hill.
But, somewhere during the process of moving the buried, the name of the town’s cemetery was changed on the grave markers. While no one knows exactly who made the switch, the recent effort to replace the headstones left current members of the corps red-faced over the actions of their cold war counterparts. “The overwhelming reaction was one of shock and embarrassment,” said Dede Cordell, a spokeswoman for the corps district in Sacramento, the state capital. “There was a lot of ‘Oh my gosh, how did this happen?’ and ‘How can we fix this?’ ”
Like many issues involving race and remembrance, the Mormon Island markers had also led to questions over who should be in charge of correcting the historical record. Like all things in California— where budget woes affect every level of government— the solution was also bound up with economic reality. Last month, the county supervisors decided to accept a bid from the California Prison Industry Authority to replace the tombstones with a new group of markers. The authority, which is a semiautonomous state agency that takes no financing from California’s coffers, said it would use private donations instead of public money to cover the project’s $18,000 cost.
That irked Mr. White. “The government is the one who did it,” he said. “So the government is the one who should have to pay for it.”
Ms. Cordell says the corps could not get directly involved despite its desire to do something, because it ceded control of the cemetery plot to the county in 1961. “I’ve had people here say: ‘Let me know when, and I will go out there personally and dig,’ ” she said. “We all feel dirty about this. It feels wrong. But we can only do it as individuals.”
The Corps did attempt to answer questions about how the change from Negro Hill occurred, by recently releasing more than a dozen documents, dating from 1951 to 1961. Several clearly refer to the cemetery by the more offensive name, something Lieutenant Colonel Andrew B. Kiger, deputy commander of the Corps district, said was “reflective of a shameful period in American history when racial intolerance was commonplace.”
Sue Silver, former president of the El Dorado County Pioneer Cemeteries Commission, a volunteer nonprofit group, said the pejorative name had come into usage in some quarters in the 1920s. But she roundly objected to its appearing on anything official. “The proper name was Negro Hill,” Ms. Silver said in an e-mail. “And that is what it should be on the markers.” Oddly enough, Ms. Silver said, most of those three dozen unidentified dead were probably white, as many prospectors were.
But the fact that no one knows for sure bothers Michael Harris, the director of the Negro Hill Burial Ground Project, who would like to see a bigger effort made to identify them, or at least their races and ages. This could be done, he suggests, with ground-penetrating radar. Such research, Mr. Harris said, might give a fuller picture of the black community’s contribution to the Gold Rush, something he feels is underrepresented. “It’s an inclusive history you must tell,” he said. Mr. Harris says he first encountered the gravestones in 1998, and he has been trying to build support for changing them ever since. He is not alone; Ms. Silver said she also discovered the markers in the 1990s.
Still, 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 fifteen, was unavailable for comment because he was climbing Kilimanjaro. “We just wanted to right a wrong,” said Tamera Michael, his mother. “We don’t care who gets credit for it. We just want them to rest in peace.”
Which, it seems, may actually happen. Eric Reslock, a spokesman for the California Prison Industry Authority, said that he expected the new stones to be placed in July. About $3,000 has been raised thus far, Mr. Reslock said, and the prison has offered the inmates’ labor free. Mr. Knight said he would ask the county for the money if donations fell short.
In the meantime, the old, offensive markers have been moved to a county storage yard, said Mike Applegarth, an El Dorado spokesman. They are likely to be destroyed, he said. “We figured it was better to get it done,” he said. “Sooner rather than later.”