James Cameron forgave Marion lynch mob, dedicated his life to serving the oppressed

"He wanted Americans to understand that what we tend to call black history is an integral part of American history," said Fran Kaplan, a consultant for the future America's Black Holocaust Museum. "He wanted people to understand how American history was shaped by what has happened to African Americans."

Kaplan noted that Cameron believed strongly in liberty, justice and the American way of government and wanted people to recognize that those principals had been denied to black Americans. 

Cameron, who died in 2006, survived a 1930 lynching in Marion when he was 16.

Thomas Shipp, 18, and Abram Smith, 19, had been arrested for the armed robbery and murder of a white man named Claude Deeter. Cameron had been with Shipp and Smith earlier that night, and he was also arrested.

When word spread around Marion of the murder and arrests, an angry mob broke into the jail, took Shipp, Smith and Cameron out of their cells and beat them. They were dragged outside, where a crowd of more than 10,000 had gathered.

Shipp and Smith were hanged from a tree on the Grant County courthouse square. Cameron had a noose placed around his neck, but his hanging was interrupted by a couple of people who convinced the mob that he was not guilty.

Badly beaten and battered, Cameron was returned to the jail. He was later tried and convicted as an accessory to the murder and served five years in prison.

When he was paroled, he went to Michigan, where he began his education at Wayne State University. He devoted the rest of his life to defending the rights of the oppressed. In 1991, he received a full pardon of his conviction from the state of Indiana.

Born in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, Cameron later moved to Milwaukee. He wrote about his life in a self-published memoir, “A Time of Terror.”

The lynching cast a pall that still lingers over Marion, journalist Cynthia Carr wrote in her 2006 book “Our Town." While doing research for the book, Carr, a native of Marion, learned that her grandfather was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

“Even as a girl,” she wrote, “I knew there’d been a lynching in Marion, Indiana. That was my father’s hometown. And on one of many trips to visit my grandparents, I heard the family story. … Someone called the house and spoke to my grandfather. ... 'Don’t walk through the courthouse square tonight on your way to work. ... You might see something you don’t want to see.'"

The late Walter White, former secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, called the 1930 Marion lynching "among the most horrible and brutal in the whole history of lynching."

But Cameron forgave the mob that tried to lynch him.

"He believed very strongly that it was really important to forgive because he would say that hate poisons the hater," Kaplan recalled.

For years, Cameron hoped to open a museum in Marion but didn’t find a receptive audience, according to Kaplan, who grew up near West Lafayette. 

By the time Cameron was 74, he had amassed enough memorabilia to open a Milwaukee garage to the public. The building closed in 2008 because of the Great Recession, organizers say.

On that site, however, a developer of mixed-income apartments has pledged to hold space open for the museum in downtown Milwaukee. Fundraising efforts for educational and capital projects are underway through the museum's website: www.abhmuseum.org

Until a museum opens, the website offers a full virtual museum.

On April 26, the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice plans an opening ceremony in Montgomery, Ala., to tell the story of African Americans, including the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow laws.

But informing Americans about a national history involving lynching has been difficult, Kaplan said.

"It is hard to get that message out even to teach about something as far back in our history as slavery, as far back as 150 years, we are still having trouble talking about it," she said. "It lasted 250 years. We've been a slave country longer than we've been a free country, yet we still don't know how to talk about it."

Cameron was inspired to create the museum after visiting the Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, in Jerusalem with his wife, Virginia.

He chose the Milwaukee museum's name to send a specific message, Kaplan added.

"He was very clear that it was America's Black Holocaust, not the American Black Holocaust Museum," she said. "He wanted it to say America's Black Holocaust, what America has been through."