James Cameron and the Museum Nobody Funded

On August seventh, nineteen thirty, a sixteen-year-old Black teenager named James Cameron was pulled from a jail cell in Marion, Indiana, by a mob of several thousand people. His two companions, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, had already been lynched. Cameron was beaten severely and was about to be killed when someone in the crowd said he was innocent of the crime he had been accused of. The mob let him go. He survived.

James Cameron was the only known survivor of a lynching in the United States. He carried the memory of that night for the rest of his life. He moved to Milwaukee, worked as a barber, raised a family, and spent decades trying to get someone, anyone, to record what had happened and what it meant in a systematic way. The responses he received were polite and insufficient.

In nineteen eighty-eight, at the age of seventy-four, James Cameron founded America's Black Holocaust Museum on North Avenue in Milwaukee's Bronzeville neighborhood. He built it with his own money and the contributions of people who believed the story should be told. The museum documented the history of slavery, lynching, and the ongoing effects of racial terror in American life. It drew visitors from across the country. It operated on minimal institutional support.

The museum closed in two thousand eight, citing financial pressures. Cameron died in two thousand six, two years before the closing, at age ninety-two. It took fourteen more years for the museum to reopen. In twenty twenty-two, America's Black Holocaust Museum reopened at a renovated location on North Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, with new exhibitions and, for the first time, real institutional backing.

The museum's survival story is part of the story it tells.