In Memoriam: H. James Cameron

(February 23, 1914-June 11, 2006)

Although he was born and died in Wisconsin, the seminal event of James Cameron’s ninety-two years occurred on August 7, 1930 in Marion, Indiana. He survived a lynching that day. No one else in the modern American conversation could say the same.

The lynching event was a double lynching of his two youthful companions, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith. All three had originally been involved in a robbery and murder of a 23-year old white man named Claude Deeter parked in a lover’s lane with his girlfriend. Shipp and Smith were hanged to death by a mob for the crime, a fate that Cameron always claimed that he’d escaped due to a miraculous intervention. Cameron also claimed to not be at the scene of the crime when the robbery and murder actually went down. The near-triple lynching was his tragedy and his salvation. After serving several years in prison for his role in the crime (as convicted by law), he went on to draw attention to the lynching phenomenon primarily in two distinct ways. He documented his survivor’s story in an autobiographical book, A Time of Terror (published in 1994 by the Baltimore-based Black Classics Press) and founded America’s Black Holocaust Museum in 1988 in Milwaukee – the city that became his eventual home.

I met him in 2000 at the museum. He was our first major interview for my own seminal idea American Lynching: A Documentary Feature. Accompanied by a Massachusetts-based film crew, we shot hours of footage with Mr. Cameron, who was even in his mid-eighties an elegant and imposing figure of a proud and resilient man. When I met him, this immensely personable human being had received a letter of pardon and public apology from the state of Indiana. He had held a state post in Indiana as Director of Civil Liberties during the early 1950s, investigating racial and other infractions threatening human freedoms. He later became a prominent Civil Rights activist, participating in both Washington D.C. marches with first the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and later with Coretta Scott King (the slain spiritual icon’s wife) and other luminaries such as the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson. 

In June of 2005 he attended a lynching apology non-binding resolution press conference at the Hart Building for the United States Senate. That was the last time I ever saw him.

Few people impressed me more.

Gode Davis – January 5, 2007