GENEALOGIST: PEOPLE MADE DO WITH WHAT THEY HAD

In May 1954, Earl Warren delivered the U.S. Supreme Court's decision declaring segregation unconstitutional.

Twenty years later he reflected on that time and said: "Interracial marriages were illegal; a black man could not even be picked up on the street by an ambulance accustomed to carrying white people. A black man could not sit in common in a theater with whites. And the worst irony of all, the dead black man could not be buried in the same cemetery with dead whites."

It has been different in Oak Grove Cemetery at Charleston and in other Southeast Missouri cemeteries.

Joan Tinsley Feezor, a Charleston genealogist and author of a 1982 compilation of those buried in Oak Grove Cemetery, said Charleston was a swampy area in the mid 1800s where people made do with the dry land they had, and Oak Grove Cemetery was on dry land.

"You lived and buried all in the same place," Feezor said. "It wasn't like other places where they could have a public cemetery out to itself. The county just wasn't drained and it couldn't be that way."

Feezor said there were once smaller all-black cemeteries that have since disappeared.

"As far as I know, in this county that is the only cemetery where black people are now being buried," she said. "There may have been some smaller family cemeteries where they might have allowed some of their slaves to be buried."

The Mississippi County Commission in February opened Oak Grove to the north and allowed people to buy plots for the first time. Anyone can buy a plot anywhere in the north end of the cemetery.