1930 Chronology Appendix 6: James Cameron

APPENDIX 6

JAMES CAMERON

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James Cameron (b. February 25, 1914, La Crosse, Wisconsin – d. June 11, 2006, Milwaukee, Wisconsin) 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.

Cameron was born on February 25, 1914, in La Crosse, Wisconsin, to James Herbert Cameron and Vera Carter. After his father left the family, they moved to Birmingham, Alabama, and then to Marion, Indiana. When James was 14, his mother remarried.

In August 1930, when Cameron was 16 years old, he went out with two older teenage African-American friends, Thomas Shipp (age 18) and Abram Smith (age 19). A white couple, Claude Deeter (age 23) and Mary Ball, was parked in a lovers lane when the trio came upon them and one of the group suggested robbing the couple. Later, Shipp and Smith killed Deeter.  Deeter's girlfriend, Mary Ball, was with him, and said she had been raped.  Cameron said he ran away before Deeter was killed.  The three youths were caught quickly, arrested, and charged the same night with robbery, murder and rape.  (The rape charge was later dropped, as Ball retracted it.)

A lynch mob broke into the jail where Cameron and his two friends were being held. According to Cameron's account, a lynch mob gathered at the Grant County Courthouse Square and took all three youths from the jail. The older two, Shipp and Smith, were killed first.  Shipp was taken out and beaten, and hanged from the bars of his jail window. Smith was dead from the beating he received from the mob.   The mob then hanged both of the boys from a tree in the square.

Then came Cameron's turn.

In his autobiography, Cameron recalled the raw, inhuman sound of the mob, which included members of the local Ku Klux Klan. He once said he still could remember the faces of the 2,000 white people who gathered there, some with their children, some eating. He prayed for his life.

Cameron was beaten and a noose was put around his neck. Then, as the noose grew tighter around his neck, the voice of an unidentified woman called out: "Take this boy back. He had nothing to do with any raping or shooting of anybody." Frank Faunce, a local sports hero and football All-American from Indiana University also intervened and removed the noose from Cameron's neck, saying he deserved a fair trial. Faunce then escorted the young man back to  the jail. Cameron's neck was long scarred from the rope.

Flossie Bailey, a local NAACP official, and the State Attorney General worked to gain indictments against leaders of the mob in the lynchings but were unsuccessful. No one was ever charged in the murders of Shipp and Smith, nor for the assault on Cameron.

Cameron was convicted at a trial in 1931 as an accessory before the fact to the murder of Deeter, and served four years of his sentence in a state prison. After he was paroled, he moved to Detroit, Michigan, where he worked at Stroh Brewery Company and attended Wayne State University.

(In 1991, Cameron was pardoned by the state of Indiana.)

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. 

He also served as the Indiana State Director of Civil Liberties from 1942 to 1950. In this capacity, Cameron reported to Governor of Indiana Henry Schricker on violations of the "equal accommodations" laws designed to end segregation. During his eight-year tenure, Cameron investigated more than 25 incidents of civil rights infractions. He faced violence and death threats because of his work.

The emotional toll of threats led Cameron to search for a safer home for his wife and five children. Planning to move to Canada, they decided on Milwaukee when he found work there. There Cameron continued his work in civil rights by assisting in protests to end segregated housing in the city. He also participated in both marches on Washington in the 1960s, the first with Martin Luther King, Jr., and the second with King's widow Coretta and Jesse Jackson. 

Cameron studied history on his own and lectured on the African-American experience. From 1955 to 1989 he published hundreds of articles and booklets detailing civil rights and occurrences of racial injustices, including "What is Equality in American Life?"; "The Lingering Problem of Reconstruction in American Life: Black Suffrage"; and "The Second Civil Rights Bill". In 1982 he published his memoir, A Time of Terror: A Survivor's Story.

Cameron worked in a brewery for a few years and at Milprint packaging company awhile. He also went to a trade school to become a boiler engineer. He worked at one of the biggest malls in Milwaukee, Mayfair Shopping Center, until age 65. He also owned a rug-cleaning business, which afforded him the chance to travel.

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 the materials in his basement. Working with others to build support for the museum, he was aided by philanthropist Daniel Bader. 

The museum started as a grassroots effort and became one of the largest African-American museums in the country.  In 2008, the museum closed because of financial problems. It reopened on Cameron's birthday, February 25, 2012, as a virtual museum.

Cameron and his wife, Virginia Hamilton, had five children. He died on June 11, 2006, at the age of 92, from congestive heart failure.  He is buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Milwaukee. Two sons, David and James, had died before him. He was survived by his wife Virginia and three children: Virgil, Walter, and Dolores Cameron, and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

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