Special to the Philanthropy Journal

By Dr. Fran Kaplan, Coordinator, ABHM’s Virtual Museum 

Upon seeing a huge pile of the small shoes removed from children on their way to the gas chambers and walking through the Garden of the Righteous who saved Jews from the Nazis at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Dr. James Cameron was moved to tears. He decided right there to create a similar museum telling the story of the terrible traumas suffered by the descendants of enslaved Africans in America – and the freedom-loving White people who tried to help. He saw how truth-telling about their tragedies and triumphs gave Jewish communities strength and hope and wanted the same for African American communities.

Closed for fourteen years, America’s Black Holocaust Museum (ABHM) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is reemerging on February 25, 2022, in honor of the birthday of its late founder. Until shortly before his death in 2006, Dr. Cameron greeted most museum visitors in person and gave tours. For over a decade, a small group of community volunteers labored to keep his critical vision and mission alive. They launched a 3300+ exhibit virtual museum and presented public history programs and cross-cultural dialogues in community venues around the region. Like their mentor, these volunteers dedicated themselves to ensuring that all Americans would have the opportunity to learn about the tragedies and triumphs lived by people of African descent in America.

What about Dr. Cameron’s vision and ABHM’s mission inspired such extraordinary efforts? It helps to understand the founder’s life itself.

James Cameron was born in 1914 to a barber in La Crosse, Wisconsin. His family later moved to Birmingham, Alabama. At eight years old, a White man there forced him to watch the lynching of a Black man. Later they moved to the small town of Marion, Indiana. He would be lynched there eight years later.

On a sweltering August night in 1930, during the Great Depression, two older teens invited Jimmie (James) for a joy ride. They stopped the car at a secluded Lover’s Lane to rob a young White couple. Jimmie recognized the man as his longtime shoeshine customer and took off running for home. As he ran, he heard a gunshot.

That night, Jimmie was jailed with the two other boys, Abram Smith and Tommy Shipp. A mob of some 15,000 people gathered around Marion’s courthouse. They believed that all three killed the young White man and raped his White girlfriend. They pulled Abe and Tommy from jail, beat and hung them. Then they came for Jimmie, dragging him to the same tree. With the rope tightening around his neck, miraculously Jimmie was spared.

They tried him as an accessory to murder and sent him to prison for five years. There he began writing his memoir, A Time of Terror: A Survivor’s Story. Paroled at age 21, he attended college in Detroit and met and married Virginia, a beautiful nurse. James and Virginia would be married for 68 years and send all their five children to college.

They moved to Anderson, Indiana, to raise their kids and start a business. James returned repeatedly to nearby Marion to interview witnesses to the lynching. He also established three NAACP chapters around the state and served as Indiana’s Director of Civil Liberties from 1942-1950. In 1952, however, his family moved to Milwaukee to escape threats of violence by the Ku Klux Klan and others angered by his civil rights work.

In Milwaukee, he worked in factories and as an HVAC technician. He authored Op-Ed pieces and letters to the editor about racial justice issues in Milwaukee and the nation and continued revising his memoir. At that time, it was hard to find a publisher courageous enough to print a memoir about growing up in the Jim Crow Era, including eyewitness details of the most widely-known American lynching. Now the book is in its third edition.

After retiring in 1979, Virginia and James took a church trip to Jerusalem where they visited Yad Vashem, the Jewish Holocaust Memorial Museum. He was struck by the similarities between the sufferings of European Jews, victims of other mass atrocities, and African Americans, including:

●      Dehumanization and vilification

●      Forced marches and migrations

●      Enslavement (forced, unpaid labor)

●      Stolen property

●      Mass incarceration

●      Torture

●      Medical experimentation

●      Discrimination in law and custom

●      Ethnic cleansing (race riots, pogroms)

●      Lynchings and other forms of terrorism

●      Mass murder

●      Long-lasting psychological effects (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) on survivors – and their descendants.

Cameron began collecting and displaying Black Holocaust artifacts in his basement study. When Virginia tired of people traipsing through their house, James opened ABHM in a series of storefronts beginning in 1988. Finally, the city sold him an old boxing gym for $1. After taking a 2nd mortgage on their home and doing most of the construction himself – at the ripe old age of 74, he opened ABHM in what would become its 20-year home on Juneteenth Day 1994. The new museum is built on the same footprint.

One of the happiest days of his life was in 1993 when the governor of Indiana issued James a pardon, erasing the record of a crime he did not commit and for which he was almost killed.

Dr. Cameron lived to fulfill his dream of educating his fellow citizens about seldom-told parts of U.S. history. He firmly believed that by learning together, by growing in the knowledge of our country’s truths, by understanding and reconciling with each other, we Americans can help our beautiful but flawed democracy achieve its founding ideals of liberty and justice for all. Dr. Cameron never stopped dreaming of us as “one single and sacred nationality.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Fran Kaplan is the Co-Founder and Lead Trainer/Consultant for Nurturing Diversity Partners. Fran holds a Doctorate in Educational Leadership and a Master of Social Work. She has spent fifty-five years working against poverty and for social justice and peace locally, nationally, and internationally. She founded ABHM’s Virtual Museum and was part of the group of community volunteers who worked to rebirth the physical museum. Fran has served as an adult educator, social worker, community organizer, and executive, program, and training director in farmworker rights, women’s healthcare, child protection, parenting education, and public history. Dr. Kaplan and her work were commended in the 2017 U.S. Congressional Record and the National Association of Social Workers’ 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award, among many other honors.