02/20/2024
James Cameron (1914-2006) was an early civil rights pioneer, self-taught public historian, and author of dozens of essays on issues in American and African American history and contemporary life. Cameron’s most well known written work is his memoir, A Time of Terror: A Survivor’s Story, now in its 3rd edition. In 1988 he founded America’s Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee awarded Cameron an honorary Doctor of Humanities degree in 1999 for a lifetime of work exhibiting materials of uncommon merit, moral and intellectual value to the city and state.
As a 16-year-old in 1930, Cameron was lynched with two older teens on the courthouse lawn in in Marion, Indiana. An estimated ten to fifteen thousand men, women, and children gathered from around the state to witness the spectacle. A professional photographer snapped the world’s most recognized lynching picture, which shows a group of spectators, one of whom is pointing to the hanging bodies of Cameron’s two companions. Cameron, though badly beaten, survived the lynching. He was imprisoned for the next five years, during which he began writing A Time of Terror.
