Racism and the Roach Family
To the editor:
Re “Private Family Burial Plot Sold With Developable Lot” [June 1, front page]:
There is no evidence whatsoever to support the divisive suggestion from the chair of the Provincetown Historical Commission that racism denied members of the Roach family interment in Provincetown cemeteries.
It is more likely that when the infant Fannie LaBelle Roach died of meningitis in 1906, she was buried on the Roach property (the first burial there) to be near her grieving parents. Her father followed in 1932, her brother in 1938, and her mother in 1945.
Provincetown death records show that any number of Blacks, among them members of the Edwards and Rocheteau families, are buried in the cemeteries. A Black whaling captain, Collin Stevenson, master of the Carrie D. Knowles, owned a plot in the Gifford Cemetery, though he was lost at sea in 1904.
How does one reconcile that the Roaches owned property in Provincetown from 1900 and yet would have been denied burial in the cemetery? How does one reconcile that Douglas Roach, a Spanish Civil War veteran, was given a hero’s funeral with military honors at the Congregational Church but would have been denied burial?
Would Provincetown have denied burial to two Roach brothers, Alexander (whose name is inscribed on the World War II tablet) and Edward, both Army veterans?
As a Christian community, Provincetown has always provided a dignified burial to everyone and anyone, even strangers washed ashore from shipwrecks. Are we to believe that a local family, by all accounts honorable and hardworking, whose children distinguished themselves in the schools, would have been denied the same rites given to strangers?
Rather than stoking division with spurious claims, all eyes should be on the fate of the Roach family graves now that the property has been sold and is being subdivided.
Amy Whorf McGuiggan
Hingham
