On the night of August 7, 1930, James Cameron’s life took a dramatic and traumatic turn. As a teenager, he and two other young Black men—Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith—were accused of robbing and assaulting a White couple in Marion, Indiana. Despite a lack of due process, a white mob stormed the jail, dragging the three young men out for a lynching. Tragically, Shipp and Smith were lynched and murdered, their lifeless bodies hung from a tree in a horrific act of racial terror.

Cameron, however, miraculously survived. As the noose was placed around his neck, someone in the crowd—perhaps influenced by divine intervention or a pang of conscience—spoke up, and he was spared. He was later convicted as an accessory to the crime and sentenced to prison, but his life was forever changed by the traumatic event.

Years later, Cameron dedicated his life to fighting racial injustice. In 1988, he founded America’s Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to educate people about the history of lynching, racial violence, and the broader Black experience in America. His work remains a testament to resilience and the pursuit of justice.

His near-lynching became one of the most well-documented events of its kind, immortalized in the infamous photograph taken that night, which later inspired Abel Meeropol’s poem Strange Fruit, made famous by Billie Holiday.