James Cameron

James Cameron (February 25, 1914 – June 11, 2006) was an American civil rights activist. In the 1940s, he founded three chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Indiana. He also served as Indiana's State Director of the Office of Civil Liberties from 1942 to 1950.

In the 1950s he moved with his family to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he continued as an activist and started speaking on African-American history. In 1988 he founded America's Black Holocaust Museum in the city, devoted to African-American history from slavery to the present.

Cameron was a survivor of a lynching attempt, which occurred when he was a 16-year-old suspect in a murder/robbery case in Marion, Indiana; two older teenagers were killed by the mob.

The three youths were caught quickly, arrested, and charged the same night with robbery, murder and rape. A lynch mob broke into the jail where Cameron and his two friends were being held. According to Cameron's account, a lynch mob of 12,000–15,000 at the Grant County Courthouse Square took all three youths from the jail. The lynch mob killed the older two first: they took Shipp out of the cell and beat him, and hanged him from the bars of his jail window; Smith was dead from beating before the mob hanged both the boys from a tree in the square. The crowd parted ways and let Cameron stumble back to the jail.

Flossie Bailey, a local NAACP official, and the State Attorney General worked to gain indictments against leaders of the mob in the lynchings. A total of eight people were indicted for the lynching. However, all of the cases were dropped after two of the defendants were acquitted.

In 1931, Cameron was tried for being an accessory before the fact to the murder of Deeter. He was convicted on a lesser count of being an accessory before the fact to manslaughter and sentenced to two to 21 years in prison. He served four years at the Indiana State Prison before being paroled in 1935. Afterwards, Cameron moved to Detroit, Michigan, where he worked at Stroh Brewery Company and attended Wayne State University.

In 1993, Governor Evan Bayh pardoned Cameron, who said his confession that he had held Ball while Smith raped her had been beaten out of him.

Career Cameron studied at Wayne State University to become a boiler engineer and worked in that field until he was 65. At the same time, he continued to study lynchings, race, and civil rights in America and trying to teach others.

Because of his personal experience, Cameron dedicated his life to promoting civil rights, racial unity, and equality. While he worked in a variety of jobs in Indiana during the 1940s, he founded three chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). This was a period when the Ku Klux Klan was still active in the Midwest, although its numbers had decreased since its peak in the 1920s. Cameron established and became the first president of the NAACP Madison County chapter in Anderson, Indiana. In 1982 he published his memoir, A Time of Terror: A Survivor's Story.

America's Black Holocaust Museum

After being inspired by a visit with his wife to the Yad Vashem memorial in Israel, Cameron founded America's Black Holocaust Museum in 1988. He used material from his collections to document the struggles of African Americans in the United States, from slavery through lynchings, and the 20th-century civil rights movement. When he first started collecting materials about slavery, he kept it in his basement. Working with others to build support for the museum, He died on June 11, 2006, at the age of 92, from congestive heart failure.

Legacy and honors PBS Wisconsin produced a documentary entitled A Lynching in Marion. Milwaukee added his name to four blocks of West North Avenue, from North King Drive to North 7th Street.

Published works