America's Black Holocaust Museum

America's Black Holocaust Museum (ABHM), located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was a memorial dedicated to the victims of the Black Holocaust. It was founded in 1988 by James Cameron, the United States' only known survivor of a lynching.

Cameron died in 2006; in 2008, the museum's board of directors announced that the museum would be closed temporarily because of financial problems. ABHM re-opened as a virtual museum in 2012.

After surviving a lynching attempt and imprisonment, starting at the age of 16, James Cameron became determined to change his life. He got an education, worked hard, and studied all his life about slavery and the African-American experience in the United States. He worked in civil rights, wrote independent articles, and collected materials having to do with African-American history.

After retirement, Cameron and his wife visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Israel. He thought that the focus on the personal history of individuals and their stories, rather than on numbers and processes, led to a better understanding of the reality of the Holocaust. Then living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1988 he founded the museum, with the help of philanthropist Daniel Bader, having been collecting materials on the African-American experience in the US for many years.

ABHM's facility, located in Milwaukee, was the only memorial dedicated specifically to the victims of the enslavement of Africans in the United States.

Cameron died in 2006; in 2008, the museum's board of directors announced that the museum would be closed temporarily because of financial problems. Its former building never re-opened, and remains vacant as of September, 2015.

A new ABHM was established as a "virtual museum" by ABHM's Board of Directors, after the bricks-and-mortar museum had been closed since 2008. The new format came online as a virtual museum on February 25, 2012, in celebration of Cameron's birthday and Black History Month.

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