A Night of Lynching, a Life of Remembering

By Sharon Cohen

Feb. 23, 2003 12 AM PT

Associated Press Writer

MILWAUKEE — He remembers every detail about that long-ago night: the pearl-white glow of the moon, the roar of the frenzied mob, the fists and clubs beating him -- then the rough hands forcing his head into a noose. And, of course, he remembers the rope. It left a burn mark on his neck.

He is an old man now, a great-grandfather with a cane and a cap of frosty silver hair. It has been more than 70 years since two of his friends were lynched one horrible August night -- and he was supposed to be next.

James Cameron turned his near-death experience into his life’s work, telling his story of Aug. 7, 1930, hundreds of times over the years and creating America’s Black Holocaust Museum -- dedicated to the suffering that blacks have endured throughout the nation’s history.

Cameron, about to turn 89 and frail from heart surgery and cancer, is determined to keep the flame burning and ensure that his small, struggling 15-year-old museum survives after he is gone.

“It’s the most important thing in the world to me to carry on this fight, to explain the history that’s been hidden ... from black people,” he said.

“I wonder if God saved me for this mission?” He paused, then answered his question: “It had to be. And I thank him for that.”

When Cameron talks about the night he was almost killed, his words flow like those of an actor with a keen sense for the dramatic pause, the telling detail, the precise moment to raise or lower his raspy voice.

Always, the memory brings tears to his eyes.

Cameron, then 16 and living in Marion, Ind., had finished playing horseshoes and accepted a ride from his friend, Thomas Shipp. Soon they picked up Abe Smith.

As they coasted along in the 1926 Ford roadster, he says, one of the other teens suggested holding up someone to get money. Cameron says he told them he wasn’t interested, but they all drove to a lover’s lane.

One of his companions, he says, handed him a .38-caliber revolver and, calling him by his nickname, said: “Apples (Cameron’s mother had an apple orchard), you take the gun and hold the people up.”

Cameron approached a car and pointed the gun at a man -- who was with a woman -- but realized it was one of his regular shoeshine customers. So, he says, he gave the gun to Shipp, told him that he wouldn’t rob anyone, then ran down the road.

A few moments later, he heard gunshots.

The man in the car had been shot to death. Rumors spread that the woman was raped. Both were white.

The three black teens were quickly rounded up and taken to jail, where thousands of people, including women and children, gathered with gas cans, iron bars and sledgehammers, crashing through bricks and pounding down the door. The mob rushed past law enforcement officers to grab the youths.

Marion actually had fairly good race relations for the time, says James Madison, an Indiana University history professor who wrote about the incident in “A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America.” He says the town had an NAACP branch and two black police officers.

None of that mattered that night.

Shipp and Smith were brutally beaten, then lynched on a tree in the courthouse square.

Cameron was next.

“They began to chant for me like a football player: ‘We want Cameron, we want Cameron,’ ” he recalled, clasping his hands tight. “I could feel the blood in my body just freezing up.”

Cameron, who says he was beaten into signing a false confession, was hit in the head with a pick handle; pummeled with fists, clubs and rocks; bitten and spat on as the mob dragged him out of the jail, shouting racial slurs. “The miracle is I didn’t go unconscious,” he said.

They pulled him toward the tree, where he saw the dangling, bloody bodies of his friends.

“They put the rope around my neck and threw it over the limb,” Cameron said. “They were getting ready to hang me up when I said, ‘Lord, have mercy, forgive me my sins.’ My mother always told us children, ‘Before you do anything, always pray.’ ”

So he prayed. “Then,” he said, “I gave up hope.”

Then suddenly, he said, came a heavenly voice with an order: “Take this boy back. He had nothing to with any raping or killing.”

The crowd parted, he says, as he stumbled back into the jail.

Cameron has asked others who were there that night, but no one else heard that voice.

But there apparently was a protest.

One man stood atop a car and shouted that Cameron was innocent and should be freed, according to documents unearthed by Madison, who said a few others also tried to calm the crowd.

The lynching scene was captured in a photo -- reproduced and sold for 50 cents -- that became an enduring symbol of racial terror in America. It shows a milling crowd, people smiling or staring calmly into the camera, women in summer dresses, men in fedoras and ties, one pointing up to the mutilated bodies.

Two men were charged with inciting the mob, but they were acquitted, according to Madison.

Cameron was convicted of being an accessory before the fact to voluntary manslaughter. He spent four years in prison, was freed at age 21, and attended technical high school and college.

He and his wife, Virginia, reared five children, and Cameron supported them as a truck driver, laundry man, record store owner, waiter, junk man and maintenance engineer.

He was a strict father, instilling pride in his children, says his 59-year-old son, Virgil, who recalls how the family resisted the segregation policies at movie theaters in Indiana.

“We sat wherever we wanted,” he said. “We were the Camerons. He had that type of strength. He would not tolerate racism.”

Cameron was always determined to tell his story. In 1946, he sent a letter to his idol, poet-writer Langston Hughes, seeking advice. He received an answer (framed on his museum wall) but no publisher.

Decades passed and, in 1979, he and his wife visited Israel and Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, where he was moved by exhibits of Jewish persecution and the inscription: “To remember is salvation. To forget is exile.”

Turning to his wife, he said, “Honey, we need a museum like that in America to show what happened to black people.”

The big civil rights museums were still years away, and Cameron’s interests were in the horrors of slavery and lynching -- atrocities he believed were neglected by white historians.

When he began soliciting help for his museum, he said, “people thought I was crazy. They thought everything should be buried and not dug up.”

He forged ahead and published his memoirs in 1982, mortgaging his house to print 5,000 copies of “A Time of Terror.” The book was later reprinted by Black Classic Press.

For his museum, Cameron visited the Library of Congress; he haunted rummage sales and bought books, lynching photos, and Ku Klux Klan robes and hoods.

In 1988, he opened his museum in a small storefront room, then six years later moved to an abandoned 12,000-square-foot gym that the city of Milwaukee sold him for $1.

About that time, he met Daniel Bader, who offered a generous check.

“He’s somehow able to put you in his skin and let you see the world through his eyes,” said Bader, president of the Helen Bader Foundation, which remains a financial supporter.

On a whim, Cameron says he wrote a letter to the governor of Indiana in 1991 seeking a pardon. Two years later, it was granted.

“It meant ... a lot to me,” he said. “They forgave me for what I had done, and I forgave them what they had done to Abe and Tommy and me.”

A week later, Cameron, decked out in a black tuxedo, returned to Marion to receive the key to the city that, an accompanying letter said, should serve to “lock out any denial of the abuses of that ugly time.”

The letter is displayed at the museum, but another piece of Marion’s past is locked up for safekeeping -- a thumb-size hunk of yellow rope given to him several years ago that was purported to have been used in the lynchings.

Over the years, Cameron’s museum has featured the works of black photographers and artifacts from the Henrietta Marie, a slave ship found off the Florida coast.

But times have been tough and the museum operates on a shoestring budget, says Jessie Leonard, the interim director. She says she’s still looking for financing for a permanent exhibit on Cameron’s life -- from his days as a young man helping to form three NAACP chapters to his protest at a klan rally a few months ago, in a wheelchair.

Leonard calls Cameron “a quiet soldier” but “not so quiet he cannot be heard.”

Cameron vows to continue talking -- and protesting -- as long as he can:

“Something inside me just keeps urging me on.”