That’s what made the news of the cemetery all the more devastating. In 2004, James Olbert, another former resident of the Crystal Block Coal camp, discovered the disarray on a visit to his father’s grave. “When I was growing up, we were taught not to step on a grave, but to walk around it,” he told the West Virginia Gazette and Mail. “Then they have the nerve to show so much disrespect with that bulldozer.”
Even more disturbing was a witness’s account of the demolition. Bud Baisden, a local who’d been passing by, said in an affidavit that he tried to stop the truck driver from bulldozing the area. Baisden said he told the driver, Vince Keaton, that he was destroying an African-American cemetery, to which the driver responded, “F— those n—–s.”
In 2006, Hairston, Olbert and 12 other relatives of the deceased sued EQT.
Lawyers for EQT, which had leased the property, said the plans it received from landowners didn’t indicate the presence of a cemetery. The damage, the company said, was accidental. Keaton, according to Hairston’s lawyer, also denied making the racial slur.
The families spent nearly a decade fighting their case in court. Hairston’s husband, a former coal miner, is disabled, and she battled breast cancer. Many of the other plaintiffs were also older and in ill health. Hairston says she wonders if the company was waiting for them to die off.
Over the years there were a series of victories and then reversals by the courts. As part of one 2012 verdict, a jury in Logan County instructed the company to pay $900,000 in damages. “Fourteen African-Americans standing up against a gas company in Logan County just shows the power of our jury system and why we must protect it,” the families’ lawyer, Kevin Thompson, told the Associated Press at the time. But in 2014, a state Supreme Court decision overturned the verdict.
Last October, the families agreed to settle. The money will establish a trust fund to preserve the cemetery, according to Thompson. (Both he and Hairston declined to specify the amount). A memorial commemorating those buried will also be erected.
It’s bittersweet, but a victory nonetheless. Says Hairston, “I can let my daddy rest.”
