James Cameron, rights advocate
Obituary
James Cameron, rights advocate
By Jocelyn Y. Stewart
Los Angeles Times
James Cameron, who was believed to be the United States' last known survivor of a lynching, and whose brush with death fostered a lifelong commitment to civil rights that included the creation of America's Black Holocaust Museum, died last Sunday of congestive heart failure at a Milwaukee hospital. He was 92 and had suffered from cancer for several years.
On a summer night in 1930, the bruised and battered bodies of two young men were found hanging from the limb of a maple tree. Between the corpses was a space, wide enough for another black youth to be lynched.
The space was intended for Cameron.
The same mob that lynched his two friends also came for 16-year-old Cameron. A noose was forced around the teen's neck. Voices called for his death.
Yet Mr. Cameron lived to tell the story of that night in Marion, Ind. ' and the story of lynching in the United States ' well into the 21st century.
"They had the rope around my neck, and they were going to rope me up between my buddies. And I prayed to God," Mr. Cameron told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last year. "I was saved by a miracle."
Mr. Cameron later gave voice to history's untold numbers of lynching victims, reminding the nation that its disgraceful past was not so long ago.
"Dad was constantly teaching," his son Virgil Cameron of Milwaukee told the Los Angeles Times. "He just wanted people to become more aware of their history. He believed if you know your history there would be a tendency not to repeat some of the things that happened."
Before that night in 1930, Mr. Cameron was a shoeshine boy with no criminal record. He was in a car with two older youths, Thomas Shipp, 18, and Shipp's friend Abe Smith, 19, when they began to plan a robbery, "and like an idiot, I followed them," he said.
The other two gave him a gun and told him to rob a couple parked at Lovers Lane. He tried, but realized the man in the car was Claude Deeter, someone whose shoes he shined. The young Cameron gave the gun back to a friend and ran home, never turning back even after he heard gunshots.
Deeter died of his wounds the next day. Word of his death and the claim that his girlfriend had been raped spread, and a huge mob soon formed. The mob broke into the jail and dragged the youths out one by one. From the window of his cell, Mr. Cameron watched the barbaric spectacle of his friends being beaten and lynched.
"They got Tommy, and they dragged him through the street like a dead horse," he told a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter.
Then they came back for Cameron. The mob brutally beat the boy, spit on him, kicked him, bit him and chanted for his death. He looked into the faces of neighbors, people whose shoes he had shined, "and with whom I'd pass the cordialities of the day."
The noose around his neck, he prepared to die. He described what happened next as divine intervention: "And then a voice came down from heaven and said, 'Take this boy back. He had nothing to do with any killing or raping.' "
Someone removed the noose, and the mob allowed him to stumble back to the jail.
Deeter's girlfriend eventually admitted she had not been raped. After a year in jail, Mr. Cameron was convicted of being an accessory before the crime and served four years of a two- to 21-year sentence.
No one was convicted of the lynchings.
After his release at age 21, Mr. Cameron moved to Detroit, where he found work driving a truck for a laundry. He met Virginia Hamilton on his route, and the two married in 1938.
The couple would have five children. In addition to his wife and son Virgil, Mr. Cameron is survived by son Walter Cameron of West Palm Beach, Fla., daughter Dolores Donzetta Cameron of Chicago, as well as five grandchildren, six great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren.
After an emotional 1979 visit to Yad Vashem, the museum in Israel that honors the memories of the millions of people killed in the Holocaust, Mr. Cameron decided to create a similar memorial to pay tribute to those black lives lost to lynching, slavery and other injustices. America's Black Holocaust Museum opened in Milwaukee in 1988.
Copyright ? 2006 The Seattle Times Company
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