The image is one most Americans would prefer to forget: Two black men, beaten and bloodied, hang from an elm tree in the Grant County Courthouse Square. A white crowd mills around beneath them, and in the foreground a man glares at the camera, pointing back at one of the bodies. A photographer snapped the picture on August 7, 1930, the night 18-year-old Thomas Shipp and 19-year-old Abram Smith were lynched in Marion, Indiana.
Now 88 and recovering from open-heart surgery, James Cameron lives on the north side of Milwaukee with his wife of 67 years, Virginia. He claims that only he heard the woman’s voice clearing him of the crime; asked why the mob let him go, he says it was a miracle. “That’s the only way I can explain it,” he says, pausing for a sip of water. “Those who aren’t religious can’t explain it.”
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The museum began humbly, in the basement of Cameron’s home, and then moved into a building owned by the Nation of Islam. In 1994 the city of Milwaukee sold Cameron an old boxing gym for $1, and the museum moved to its present location, at 2233 N. Fourth Street. Its exhibits were few: some books, Colored Only and Whites Only signs from the jim crow era, two mannequins hanging by ropes from a replica of a tree, and Lawrence Beitler’s photographs of the lynching Cameron barely survived. According to Maxine May, docent at the museum, not a single person walked through its doors for the first six months.
Cameron says he’s never met anyone who participated in the Marion lynching, though last year a granddaughter of one of the Klansmen visited the museum to deliver an apology and participate in Cameron’s 87th birthday celebration. The city of Marion has made amends: on February 11, 1993, a week after Cameron was pardoned by the governor, Mayor Ron Mowery presented Cameron with the key to the city, as well as the key to his second-floor jail cell. And five years later voters in Grant County elected Oatess Archey, a Marion native and retired FBI agent, as Indiana’s first black sheriff.
