Cameron, James Herbert

Source:

 African American National Biography

Cameron, James Herbert

(25 Feb. 1914–11 June 2006),

survivor of a lynching attempt, civil rights activist, and founder of America's Black Holocaust Museum, was born in La Crosse, Wisconsin, to James Herbert Cameron, a barber, and Vera Cameron who was employed as a laundress, cook, and housekeeper. At the age of fifteen months, James was the first African American baby ever admitted as a patient to the St. Francis Hospital in La Crosse, where he underwent an emergency operation on the abdominal cavity. By the time James started school, his parents had moved to Birmingham, Alabama, and his parents separated.

When Cameron was sixteen he was living with his mother, two sisters, and grandmother in Marion, Indiana. His stepfather Hezikiah Burden hunted and fished long distances from home so was away from his family most of the time. The family lived in a segregated section of Marion, Indiana, which counted about four thousand blacks among its total population of twenty-five thousand in 1930.

Cameron had graduated from the D.A. Payne School in Marion and planned to attend McCullough High School. During the summer in 1930 he shined shoes in the interurban railway station to earn money. On an August evening of 1930 he was riding in a car with his friends Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp when Smith said he wanted to hold up somebody and pulled out a gun. After finding a man and a woman in a parked car, Smith handed the gun to Cameron. When Cameron realized during the holdup that the white, male target was one of his shoe-shine customers, he handed the gun back to Smith. Disavowing any association with the robbery and any further association with Smith and Shipp, he ran home. Having run for four or five minutes, Cameron was some distance away when he heard the sound of gunfire, and he continued to run.

The police found him at home, took him to the police station, and proceeded to interrogate him about the incident while beating him. Cameron signed a paper under duress, later learning it was a confession admitting that Smith raped the woman and that Shipp shot the man. Cameron, who was booked on charges of bad associates, armed robbery, criminal assault, rape, and probable first-degree murder, was placed in the Grant County jail with Smith and Shipp.

On 7 August 1930 a crowd of white people gathered around the jail. Rumors of a lynch mob were reported in newspapers and radio broadcasts in the Midwest. Marion's black men moved their families for safekeeping to Weaver, Indiana (a town that had been a station on the Underground Railroad during slavery days), and planned to return with arms to combat the mobsters. Many whites as well as blacks tried unsuccessfully to call the governor to intervene. When the victim of the shooting died, an armed crowd of whites around the jail grew to ten to fifteen thousand. They ripped out the door of the jail with a sledgehammer, and the sheriff did not stop them. The mob seized Thomas Shipp, beat and hanged him, and proceeded to do the same to Abram Smith.

The mob returned to the jail from the courthouse square, where they had hanged the men from a tree, to seize Cameron. They beat him with weapons, mauled him on the way to the courthouse lawn, and placed his head into a noose. By this time a number of people in the crowd had witnessed enough violence to listen to someone who shouted that Cameron was innocent. They removed the noose and took him back to the jail.

While Cameron was transferred for safekeeping to other facilities of incarceration, some whites in Marion clamored for the state attorney general's office to investigate the lynching. The NAACP collected money for Cameron's defense and sent NAACP Executive Secretary Walter Francis White to investigate the lynching.

Cameron's mother employed the prominent Indianapolis attorneys Robert L. Bailey and Robert L. Brokenburr for his defense while Cameron was in the state reformatory at Pendleton. They secured a change of venue to Anderson, Indiana, where Cameron was transferred to await trial. The sheriff in this venue protected Cameron and made him a “turnkey trusty,” which meant that successful performance of Cameron's jail duties depended upon whether he proved to be trustworthy.

Bailey and Brokenburr succeeded in obtaining three postponements of the trial while having some of the charges dropped each time. Cameron's trial opened 29 June 1931 on a charge of being an accessory before the fact to first-degree murder. Court testimony of the victim's female companion exonerated Cameron. His signed confession was thrown out of court. On 7 July 1931 he was found guilty of being an accessory before the fact to voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to imprisonment at Pendleton for a term of not less than two years or more than twenty-one years. After serving four years of the sentence, he was released from prison on a five-year parole. During his term of imprisonment, Cameron enrolled in school; he eventually obtained a high school degree and completed two years of community college.

Cameron moved to Detroit. He was employed in a variety of jobs, including milk deliveryman, table waiter, laborer, janitor, salesman, small business owner, and reporter. In 1938 he married Virginia Hamilton and had five children.

In the 1940s he became president of the Madison County branch of the NAACP in Anderson, Indiana, and organized other NAACP chapters in Muncie and South Bend, Indiana. From 1942 to 1950 he served as director of Indiana's Civil Liberties Union, reporting violations of the equal accommodations laws to end segregation.

He and his family relocated to Wisconsin in 1953, where he established an air-conditioning and refrigeration business. In Milwaukee he became involved in work to end housing discrimination there. During the 1960s he joined the civil rights marches on Washington. He also wrote 240 articles and pamphlets detailing racial injustices and spoke before groups in the United States and Europe.

In 1988 he founded America's Black Holocaust Museum, Inc., in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a nonprofit venture dedicated to preserving the history of lynching in the United States and the African American struggle for equality. He served as its director and president.

In 1991 he wrote to the then governor of Indiana, B. Evan Bayh III, asking for a pardon from the state for the indiscretion of his youth. The pardon was issued on 3 February 1993, and Cameron received it along with a key to the city of Marion, Indiana.

Cameron's story received media attention from Ebony and The Oprah Winfrey Show. In 1999 he was awarded an honorary doctor of humanities degree from the University of Wisconsin. In 2002 he received the National Education Association's Carter G. Woodson Memorial Award, a human rights award. James Cameron died in Milwaukee on 11 June 2006.

processed xml | source xml