Even the evil deserve a decent burial

Tamerlan Tsarnaev was buried last week at a small Muslim cemetery in rural Virginia, far away from the massive chaos he created while detonating bombs that disrupted the Boston marathon, killing and dismembering many people. During the search for him, a police officer was killed and a city was kept in terror.

Tsarnaev is the face of evil, and it’s easy to understand why people in the Boston area were reluctant to see him buried in their area.

Still, I’m glad they found a place for him to rest in peace — the kind of peace that he denied to a city and a nation. We are, after all, a nation far bigger than Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

That is a lesson I learned many years ago from John Jones, who had once lived in the city where I was at the time, the upstate New York blue collar factory city of Elmira.

Actually, Jones died 100 years before I got there, but the lesson he taught remain a fabric of life in Elmira.

He is a hero — an unsung hero who gets far too little attention in civil rights history.

Jones was a slave who escaped his Virginia plantation and found himself in Elmira.

He became a civic leader, being involved in many civic activities, especially First Baptist Church, the beautiful building that still graces the town square.

And Jones became a leader in the Underground Railroad, shepherding escaped slaves through Elmira en route to Canada. At times, up to 20 slaves were hidden in his home.

He became the sexton of Woodlawn Cemetery, where most of Elmira’s deceased residents were buried.

When Civil War broke out, Elmira was a hotbed of abolitionism. Men flocked to support the Yankee cause.

What better place, federal officials thought, to build a POW detention center than Elmira?

So began the Elmira detention center, soon known by prisoners — and many on the outside — as Hellmira.

Thousands of prisoners were crammed into a small, swampy area on the shores of the Chemung River.

There was not enough food. No sanitation facilities. No medical facilities.

Had the Confederacy won the war, Hellmira superintendents would have been the ones tried for war crimes, not the folks from Andersonville.

There was a little concern from Elmira residents. There was a tower just outside the facility where people could climb to the top and see the suffering before them. It was a popular sight.

Soon, large numbers of prisoners were dying. They were dumped into a pile and brought to Woodlawn Cemetery. A mass grave was suggested to Jones.

Jones would hear none of it.

“Everyone deserves a decent burial,” he said.

So he scrimped and saved and worked overtime to see that every one of the deceased Confederates was properly buried.

Had the soldiers met Jones when they were alive, they would have tried to re-enslave him. They looked at him as less than a human being because his ancestors were from Africa.

Jones saw the deceased soldiers as human beings.

Even today, Sons of the Confederacy make a yearly trek to Elmira to play Taps at Woodlawn for the rows of wooden crosses where the soldiers are buried.

They can do so because of a whom man their cause wanted in chains.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev will correctly go down in history as an evil man who deserves no quarter or sympathy.

But in the spirit of John Jones, he will have a decent burial.

(John Kelleher is managing editor of the Havre Daily News. He can be reached at [email protected], 406-265-6795, ext. 17, or 406-390-0798.)