Why my grandfather was allowed to be buried in a racially-restricted area of a cemetery

My grandfather, on my maternal side, was born in Italy, yet he's buried in a racially-restricted cemetery, which may have something to do with his status in the community, or the fact that it was much later than when the cemeteries were designated that way, where he lived, in northern Minnesota.

And, unless you're interested in how the concept of race changes in history, you may be wondering if he was Black, or Jewish. Nah, he was just Italian. He came to America when he was a kid, worked his way out to Michigan as a lumberjack, worked in the mines, met a lovely French-Canadian girl (my grandmother), married her, and the story that I've always liked is that for her he became a Presbyterian, and for him she learned to cook spaghetti.

Of course, biologically there's only one race, the human race, but for about as long as there have been people, they've divided themselves up into groups, so that they can hate. I know that I won't live long enough to see the end of this, but at some point it will be impossible to determine if someone is a particular race by skin color, and that something else will have to be created, like geography, which is believe is already happening.

My grandparents would have represented what would have been considered two dramatically different groups of people in northern Minnesota in 1919, when they were married. She was Northern European, and he was Southern European. And the Northern European people looked down on the Southern European people, going so far as to divide the cemetery, so that they wouldn't even have to be together in death.

As someone who has done my genealogy, and has always been interested in history, my grandparents seem to be something of an anomaly. I can only say that my grandfather must have been quite a man, intelligent, dignified, and he probably suffered a lot of insults, and I'd like to think with a smile.

And yes, they're together forever.

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