Good Morning POU.
This week’s topic is a somber one. There are many individuals whose lives were brutally taken in an effort to terrorize Black people into a degrading subhuman existence. During the first half of the 20th century, lynchings of African-americans were a normal occurrence. This domestic terrorism was orchestrated not by rogue, “lone wolf” men – but by local law enforcement, local businessmen – bankers, doctors, even pastors. Some of these murderers are still alive today. In many of the small rural towns were most lynchings took place, the relatives of the victims and victimizers carry the weight of the truth about a past that is still present.
Today we tell the story of Dr. James Cameron, founder of America’s Black Holocaust Museum and a lynching survivor.
MARION, INDIANA. August 7, 1930. In the dark before dawn, County Sheriff Jacob Campbell and his officers arrested four black teenagers in their homes. By evening, two would be dead.
The Accused
James Cameron, 16, and Abram Smith, 19, were shoeshine boys. Thomas Shipp, 18, worked at Malleable, a foundry. Robert Sullivan’s occupation is unknown.
They were taken to the fortress-like jail in downtown Marion, the county seat, population 25,000. There the sheriff and his men beat and interrogated each boy separately until they extracted confessions. Afterwards Tommy, Abe, and Jimmy were locked into separate cells to await trial. For some reason, Robert was released.
The Crime and the Victims
The sheriff charged the boys with raping a white teenager, Mary Ball, 19, and shooting a white man, Claude Deeter, 23, the night before.
It was the beginning of the Great Depression. Claude, eldest son of farming family, had been laid off earlier that day from his foundry job at Superior Body. Townspeople described Mary in very different ways: loose, a prostitute, Claude’s fiancée, Abram’s girlfriend.
Claude had taken Mary to Lovers’ Lane, a clearing by the river just outside of Marion. The boys crept up on them, pulled them from the car and held them up at gunpoint for money. Supposedly they raped Mary, then beat and shot Claude several times before driving off. A nearby farmer answered Mary’s cries for help and took Claude to the hospital.
Word Spreads Far and Wide
On that hot August day, while Claude fought for his life, the news of Mary’s rape spread like wildfire. People talked about it all over Marion. They called their relatives and friends in nearby towns and farms. Word even reached cities and towns one hundred miles away.
Marion’s police chief hung Claude’s bloody shirt out the window of the police station like a flag. Crowds of angry white people began to gather around the jail where the black teens were being held.
By early afternoon, Claude died. Word that a hanging was planned had reached across Indiana. Whites were pouring into town by interurban trains, automobiles and farm wagons to witness the spectacle. The crowd was estimated at ten to fifteen thousand men, women and children.
Many black families hurried out to Weaver, an all-black town nearby. Others stayed in Marion and prepared for an attack on their neighborhoods by white rioters.
The Lynching
By evening the crowd was demanding that Sheriff Campbell turn the accused boys over to them. When he refused, strong young men brought sledge hammers from the nearby foundries. They broke the brick around the iron entrance door. The lynching party surged into the jail and passed through unlocked doors to the cell blocks.
They brought Tommy out first. The crowd dragged him along the cobblestone street, beating his body with bricks, crowbars, high-heeled shoes, and boards. Someone brought a rope. They tied it around the barely conscious boy and pulled him back to the jail. There they hanged him from the window bars.
Abe was next. The mob beat and dragged him down the street to one of the large trees around the courthouse. When the lynchers started to pull him up, Abe tried to pull the noose from his neck. They lowered him down, stabbed him, and broke his arms. Then they pull him up again.
Watch the testimony of three eyewitnesses to the event:
The lynching party then brought Tommy’s lifeless body from the jail window and hung it next to Abe’s. Photographer Laurence Beitler was called in to take a formal portrait of the dead boys and crowd. This was a regular ritual in spectacle lynchings.
Finally, late at night, the crowd called for Cameron.
“After 15 or 20 minutes of having their pictures taken and everything, they came back to get me,” Cameron told NPR in 1994. “Just then the sheriff, and he was sweating like somebody had throwed a bucket of water in his face. He told the mob leader: ‘Get the hell out of here, you already hung two of ’em so that ought to satisfy ya.’ Then they began to yell for me like a favorite basketball or football player. They said: ‘We want Cameron, we want Cameron, we want Cameron.’
“I will never forget my mother pleading and crying for them to take her instead of me. That’s just not something you forget.”
“And I looked over to the faces of the people as they were beating me along the way to the tree. I was pleading for some kind of mercy, looking for a kind face. But I could find none. They got me up to the tree and they got a rope and they put it around my neck. And they began to push me under the tree. And that’s when I prayed to God. I said, ‘Lord have mercy, forgive me my sins.’ I was ready to die.”
Jimmy was badly beaten and dragged from the jail to the square. The lynching party stood him up between the two hanging corpses and placed a noose around his neck.
The Miracle
Suddenly a voice rang out, “Take this boy back. He had nothing to do with any raping or killing.” Miraculously, the crowd calmed down, and Jimmy stumbled back to jail. Later the crowd became occupied with trying to start fires under the two hanged boys. Sheriff Campbell’s men sneaked Jimmy out of town to another jail for safekeeping.
Serving Time
Jimmy Cameron spent a year in jail awaiting trial. At his trial, Mary Ball testified that she had not been raped after all. The all-white jury believed Cameron’s story. He said that he had run away from Lover’s Lane when he recognized Claude Deeter as his regular shoeshine customer. He was not there when Deeter was shot.
The judge sentenced Cameron to two to twenty-one years as an accessory before the fact. He served four years in the Indiana State Reformatory before being paroled.
What Happened to the Lynchers
Despite the photograph and what eyewitnesses told investigator Walter White shortly after the event, townspeople claimed not to recognize any of the lynchers. None were ever brought to justice.
James Cameron’s future
James Cameron went on to found three chapters of the NAACP, served as Indiana’s State Director of the Office of Civil Liberties and founded America’s Black Holocaust Museum. For eight years, beginning in 1942, he served as the state’s director of civil liberties, a position whose duties included reporting to the governor on violations of the “equal accommodations” laws.
In 1993, the governor of Indiana, Evan Bayh, formally pardoned Cameron.
“When a traumatic event happens like that, it makes an indelible imprint on the mind,” Cameron said. “But I told him, since Indiana had forgiven me, I, in turn, forgive Indiana.”
Cameron died on June 11, 2006, at the age of 92.
Cultural Impact – “Strange Fruit”
One of Billie Holiday’s most iconic songs is “Strange Fruit,” a haunting protest against the inhumanity of racism. Many people know that the man who wrote the song was inspired by a photograph of a lynching. The photo is of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith.
The man behind “Strange Fruit” is Abel Meeropol. He attended Dewitt Clinton High School, a public high school in the Bronx that has an astonishing number of famous people in its alumni. James Baldwin went there. So did Countee Cullen, Richard Rodgers, Burt Lancaster, Stan Lee, Neil Simon, Richard Avedon and Ralph Lauren.
Meeropol graduated from Dewitt Clinton in 1921; he went on to teach English there for 17 years. He was also a poet and a social activist, says Gerard Pelisson, who wrote a book about the school.
Meeropol once said the photograph “haunted” him “for days.” So he wrote a poem about it, which was then printed in a teachers union publication. An amateur composer, Meeropol also set his words to music. He played it for a New York club owner — who ultimately gave it to Billie Holiday.
When Holiday decided to sing “Strange Fruit,” the song reached millions of people. While the lyrics never mention lynching, the metaphor is painfully clear:
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.