El Dorado supes to take up racist headstone issue
By Carlos Alcalá, Sacramento Bee
El Dorado County officials hope to take a firm step to right a 57-year-old wrong at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, with a proposal to replace 36 headstones at Mormon Island Cemetery that feature a racist slur stamped into the concrete.
The markers are on anonymous graves relocated from the Gold Rush town of Negro Hill before the area was inundated by water behind the Folsom Dam in 1954.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers contracted to move those graves and those from several other cemeteries and isolated gravesites to be flooded.
However, recently released documents show the Corps consistently used the epithet usually referred to as “the N-word” in the place of “Negro” when referring to the town.
