A lynching and a “voice from Heaven”
Cutline from "Without Sanctuary": "The lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, a large gathering of lynchers. August 7, 1930, Marion, Indiana"
Look at the photo above: What is more repulsive, the sight of the battered and hanged bodies or the church-picnic smiles of the crowd that perpetrated the crime or just sat back and enjoyed it?
James Cameron was 16 years old when a mob in Marion, IN, came to lynch him and two other African-American men, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, on August 7, 1930. He tells the story in A Time of Terror and there’s a retelling of it here as well as in Without Sanctuary, the online exhibit on the shameful history of lynching in America:
The lynchers posed for photos under the limb that held the bodies of the two dead men. …Then the mob headed back for James Cameron and “mauled him all the way to the courthouse square,” shoving and kicking him to the tree, where the lynchers put a hanging rope around his neck. Cameron credited an unidentified woman’s voice with silencing the mob (Cameron, a devout Roman Catholic, believes that it was the voice of the Virgin Mary) and opening a path for his retreat to the county jail and, ultimately, for saving his life.
Photos of the lynched bodies were sold for 50 cents and the mob fought for pieces of the corpses’ clothing as souvenirs. The jovial mood of the Midwestern crowd that has just seen two other human beings beaten, hanged and tortured is the most shocking aspect of the photo that sold in the thousands. Cameron remembers looking at the mob and recognizing classmates, men whose shoes he had shined and others whose lawns he had mowed. The capacity for grisly violence and the desire to have a tidy yard can parodoxically coexist in the same human being.
Dr. James Cameron
Cameron devoted his life to teaching others about mob violence and racism with the NAACP and at the Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, WI. He believed that the Blessed Mother saved his life and certainly no force other than divine intervention could have rescued a terrified teenager from death by mob justice. In his 80s, Cameron described the voice thus: “It was a voice from heaven. It was a miracle … God saved me for [what] I’m doing today.” Others who heard the voice described it as “an angelic voice” and as a “sweet, undefiled, and distinct voice, unlike any he had ever heard.”
Cameron and the lynched men had been accused of shooting a white man and raping his girlfriend. The victim was another of Cameron’s shoeshine clients and he never took part in shooting him, but one of his friends fired the gun and the man lay dead. After the lynching, the girlfriend’s testimony came to light and she denied that the young men had ever touched her, but it was irrelevant by then. Cameron spent four years in prison for being present during the robbery; he received a pardon in 1993. Cameron died at the age of 92 in 2006, still being moved to tears every time he told the story of his near-lynching and his salvation by Our Lady. His faith, and the rope burns around his neck, always remained with him.
