James Cameron (activist)

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

At his death, Cameron was the only known survivor of a lynching attempt.

Cameron was born 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, then to Marion, Indiana. When James was 14, his mother remarried.

In August 1930, when Cameron was 16 years old, he and two older teenage friends, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, were charged in Marion with the murder of a young white man, Claude Deeter, during an armed robbery attempt, and with the rape of his girlfriend (the latter charge was dropped). Cameron said he ran away before the man was killed. The three were caught quickly and 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 own account, the two older boys were taken out first, beaten and lynched by a mob of 12,000–15,000 at the Grant County Courthouse Square. Shipp was taken out and beaten, hanged 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. Cameron was beaten and a noose was put around his neck; before he was hanged, the voice of an unidentified woman intervened, saying that he was not guilty. He was returned to the jail. Cameron said his neck was scarred from the rope.

Mrs. 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 the assault on Cameron.

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