James Cameron

Founder/Director

Americas Black Holocaust Museum, Inc.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

August 7, 1930.

The night James Camerons life changed forever. A day before, he and two other young Black

men were arrested for the robbery, rape and assault of a White couple in Marion, Indiana. James

is in a cell in the Grant County Jail. There is a lynch mob outside numbering into the thousands.

James is sixteen years old.

The mob comes into the jail and grabs one of men accused, with James, of the crime. He is beaten

unconscious, dragged outside and lynched. The second man is then given the same treatment. The

bodies of these two men, Tom Shipp, 18, and Abraham Smith, 19, hanging from a tree is depicted

in a famous and disturbing photograph. The mob now comes for James. He is beaten and dragged

out to the tree where his friends now hang and the rope is placed around his neck. It is at this

moment that James remembers hearing what he describes as an angelic voice above the crowd

say Take this boy back, he had nothing to do with any killing or rape. Suddenly the hands that

were beating him are now helping him. The rope is taken from around his neck and the crowd

clears a path for him to walk back to the jail. In interviews he later conducted with people who

were in the crowd, no one remembers hearing any voice. Their reason for why the crowd did not

lynch James: You were lucky that night. Though James never admitted any guilt in the assault (he

admits that he was there), he served 4 years in prison. The female victim later changed her story

and confirmed that James had no part in the assault.

After he was paroled, James Cameron moved to Milwaukee. During his career, he held several

jobs including table waiter, laborer, construction worker, laundry worker, salesman, janitor, ditch

digger, record shop owner, theater custodian, junkman, newspaper reporter, shoeshine boy and

cardboard-box factory worker. He also organized the Madison County Branch of the NAACP in

Madison and other chapters in Muncie and South Bend,

BlackFacts Details

Popular Topics