Segregation in the Hereafter?
Fri., March 28, 1997
A quick scan of the local obituary page shows that funeral services for African Americans tend to be handled by King Tears Mortuary, Fuller-Sheffield Funeral Services, or Rest Haven, all businesses either owned or operated by blacks. Hispanics usually are cared for by Angel Funeral Home or Mission Funeral Home, which are owned by Hispanics. Whites, more often than not, go elsewhere.
It's not a matter of segregation, says the Rev. J. Charles Merrill, senior pastor of University United Methodist Church. He says people usually choose a funeral home that's nearest their church or in the neighborhood where they live. Since many blacks and Hispanics still tend to live in predominantly black or Hispanic neighborhoods, they patronize the neighborhood undertaker.
"It's strictly a matter of culture and geography," Merrill says. "I think what drives that more than anything else is location and tradition. Tradition is very strong in the way people choose funeral homes. The good ones get their business by referral and that word really gets around congregations." Funeral homes that serve a community well establish a reputation among the people, Merrill says. If a funeral home did a good job on your grandfather, he says, you'd probably consider taking your father there, too.
But if it's mostly tradition that leads a person to a certain funeral home today, that wasn't always the case. It wasn't too long ago that segregation was a matter of practice, if not law, and white funeral homes were off-limits to African Americans and Hispanics.
"Whites would not embalm or handle blacks, so that's why they formed their own funeral homes," says Gloria McDade, administrative assistant for King Tears Mortuary. "It was the same way with Hispanics; the whites would not handle them. So at need, you take care of your own." She also recalls that in smaller cities, with no minority-owned funeral homes, morticians would use a separate area of their shops for embalming blacks and Hispanics.
Bryan DeLeon, funeral director at Angel Funeral Home, says his business was founded in 1962 as an offshoot of Cook-Walden Funeral Home. Originally, Angel was called Cook Chapel of Roses and was located on East Second Street.
"It was made basically to keep the Hispanics on their side of the town and because the racism was pretty prevalent," DeLeon says. "The intermixing of the two individual races, the whites and Hispanics -- you didn't want that. If you were Cook-Walden, you really didn't want that. You wanted them to have their own facility, but at the same time you wanted to provide those services to the Hispanic community."
Former Cook-Walden owner Charles Walden says that Cook-Walden always provided service to all races, but he confirms that Cook-Walden originally hired Joe Davilla to run Cook Chapel of Roses. Davilla eventually bought the funeral home and later sold it to Angel, which moved it from East Austin to South Congress Avenue in 1976, and then to South First Street earlier this year.
But things have changed, and both DeLeon and McDade note that their funeral homes are handling more whites, and that others are taking more minorities. "As time's gone by, we've been doing a lot of white services more and more each year, and also we're finding that Cook-Walden is doing a lot of black services now," she says. "But there were a lot before who wouldn't allow a black body in their embalming room."
Billy Peel, owner of Austin-Peel & Son Funeral Home, says he has seen an increase of minority customers at white-owned funeral homes over the past 30 years. He attributes that partially to the changing demographics of Austin's neighborhoods and the fact that races are less likely now to live in certain parts of town than a few decades ago. "People die, we treat them," Peel says. "They're people and we do what we need to do, regardless of who they are."
But although the segregation has ended, many African Americans still "feel more comfortable" with a black-owned funeral home, McDade says. Similarly, DeLeon cites a "cultural bias" that often leads Hispanics to Hispanic-owned funeral homes. "I think there are still differences between the Hispanic culture and the black culture and the Anglo culture," he says. "Sometimes I get a little uncomfortable talking about race and culture as being sort of the same, but I think that there are just different ways that Hispanics will do things. While the Catholic faith is the same for anybody, there are certain elements of the Catholic faith for Hispanics -- for example, the Lady of Guadalupe -- that are different.... It's a lot of different things and it's kind of hard to explain unless you've lived it. But I can see, because I've helped other funeral homes, that there are cultural differences. Like I said, I think it's just a bias where you think that if you're Hispanic, that funeral home will somehow be more readily able to serve you with your culture in mind because you've lived that same reality." -- Karl Pallmeyer
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