El Dorado County officials ready to replace offensive headstones
By Carlos Alcalá, Sacramento Bee
Officials are vowing to execute plans to replace racist gravestones at the Mormon Island Relocation Cemetery, even though the activist who pushed hardest for their replacement now appears to want to stall it.
“I don’t want to wait any longer,” El Dorado County Supervisor John Knight said Friday. His district includes the El Dorado Hills cemetery.
The offensive headstones have had a convoluted history ever since the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers oversaw their installation in 1954.
The graves were moved from the community of Negro Hill to make way for Folsom Lake. When the graves were moved, new concrete markers bore a racist version of the town’s name, using the so-called N-word.
The epithet was just used for the town, not the deceased, as those buried there are unnamed and of unknown races.