PBS Wisconsin Documentaries Lynching_in_Marion Transcript.rtf

- Announcer: Funding for this	program has been provided in part by the Corporation	for Public Broadcasting and by the financial support of viewers like you.

[wind whooshing]	
[gentle music]

- Narrator: The jail is empty now. The wind blows through broken windows and the paint has blistered and peeled back with time. The past has left its mark here.
Traces of stories are carved into walls, suggested by what remains. There is a history here that can be read through the rust and stains, read by the shadows.

In this deserted prison	in Marion, Indiana, there is one story from these halls
that through its telling, peels back a larger story in our country's history.
Seldom told, seldom acknowledged, it is a shadow that falls	to present day and beyond. It is a common stain on our past, our country's legacy of lynching.

- James Cameron: So the mob came back, told the crowd, said "Cameron's not in here."
And they said, "Yes, he	is, and we want him." And then they began to chant for me like a football player. "We want Cameron, we want Cameron, we want Cameron."
And I could feel my body feel like I was encased in a ice suit. I was just cold all over.

[gentle guitar music]

[fire crackling]

- Narrator: James Cameron, one man's story of a	lynching in Marion.

- It was in this spot right here that the lynching took place. August 7th, 1930.
I was 16 years old, Tommy was 18, and Abe was 19.

- Narrator: August 7th, 1930. Herbert Hoover was president, it was Dust Bowl days in the Plains, and the Depression was just beginning. On August 7th, 1930, this man, James Cameron, survived a lynching in Marion, Indiana. His two friends did not.

It's hard to know exact	figures, but certainly thousands and thousands of Americans have been lynched in this country in nearly every state of the Union, from the Deep South to Duluth, Minnesota,	for all matter of crimes, real or imagined, from stealing cattle to consorting with white women, from refusing to leave their land, to asking a little girl	to read a letter for them. For all matter of offenses, justice was fractured and fell to mob rule, and Americans were lynched. Some describe it with the word "holocaust," a great destruction.
[fire crackling]
This is James Cameron's story. One entry in the ledger, one	chapter in this larger story.

- Back in 1930, they was lynching us all over the country, one or two every week, see, in some parts of the United States. And it wasn't nothing never done about it.

- Narrator:	Cameron's story began when he was a 16-year-old boy out with his two older friends, Tommy Shipp and Abram Smith, on a hot, sultry night in Marion, Indiana.
[wind whooshing]
He began the story for us miles from Marion in an interview from	his current home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

- See, we, we had been pitching horseshoe that night. Whole bunch of us out in the neighbor's backyard. And it was August 6th, 1930. And that night, the moon was shining as bright as day. Those kind of Indiana nights, you know. And I was just getting ready to go home, and they asked me would I like to go for a ride?
And I said, I didn't mind that. And then when we got in the car, then they'd suggested that we hold up somebody, and I wanted to	get out of the car and they wouldn't let me out. So we got on out there	and I kept following them like I was tied to 'em. And I got myself in a whole lot of trouble.

- Narrator: We all grow	up with certain pictures in our minds, images that hold our history, stories told in black and white. For generations of Black children
growing up in this country, pictures like these told the story of racism. These images served as a form of social control. Pictures like these burned in a lesson: a lesson of fear.
[fire crackling]

- We parked the car, and we got out of the car and I followed them, just as if I was tied to 'em. I could hear the fish jumping in the river that ran alongside the Lover's Lane. And you could hear the crickets singing their songs. Shows you how stupid I was,	how silly I was, trying to keep up with my peers, showing that I'm just as	brave as they were, you know.

[crickets chirping]

- Narrator: Some 60 years ago, this was a deserted Lover's Lane surrounded by farm fields, where Cameron followed his friends into crime. Some 60 years later, Cameron walks the site just southeast of Marion, where as a 16-year-old boy, who had never been in trouble before, he listened to a friend's appeal and made an awful mistake.
He joined their plan to rob a couple on Lover's Lane.

- So like an idiot, I took the gun and went up to the car and opened the car window, and I said, "Stick 'em up." And when I said that, the couple in the backseat of the car came out. The man came out first and then the young girl,	they were both white. Her face was lovely and	pale and frightened. And when I looked at this man, I said, "Holy smokes."

This was a man that used to come into the interurban station where I worked, and he used to come in and get his shoes shined all the time and I was his shoeshine boy. I mean, he tipped me and we'd laugh and talk and everything. When I looked up and saw him, I said, "Holy smokes, I got no business being here." So I gave the gun to Tommy and I said, "I'm not gonna have anything to do with you guys."
And I left. And soon as I left, about 5 or 10 minutes later I'd run away from there, I imagine I'd gone about three or four blocks when I heard some shooting, sort of bang, bang, bang, just like that. Well, I might've been foolish, but I wasn't crazy. I wasn't going back to	see who was shooting who.

- Narrator: Old newspaper accounts, grainy and faded, show photos of 21-year-old Claude Deeter, shot four times, and his fiancée, 19-year-old Mary Ball.

- I kept on running, and there was a car coming down the Lover's Lane, and the headlights was flooding the road. I jumped over into some bushes and ducked down
so the headlights	wouldn't see me as I was running towards it. And I was hoping some snake or something wouldn't bite me as I lay there in the bush. And when the car passed,	I got up and ran across the 38th Street bridge and hit the railroad tracks and ran all the way home. And when I got home, it looked like I'd been dipped in Lake Michigan. My clothes were just hanging there with sweat.

So my mother opened the door and said, "What's the matter, you in some kind of trouble?" I said, "No, Mother, I've	been playing football at Old Man Henderson's field," I lied to her. I think about that now, how I lied to my mother. And she said, "You in some kind of trouble?" I said, "No, Mom." And she could tell I was lying, though, 'cause you know how mothers have a habit of looking at children, they can tell what's happening. She was that kind of a mother. About 2 o'clock that morning, there was a big rap on the door, and I knew it was the police, instinctively.

They wanted to know, did James Cameron live here? She said, "Yeah, he's my son.
"What's happened,	what's he done?" And they said, "Where is he?" And she said, "He's	upstairs in bed." So they came right on past her. And she was screaming and hollering and having hysterical fits. That woman was going crazy. Said, "What's he done, he's my only boy. What's he done, tell me, what's he done? What kind of trouble is he in?" And then she said, "Lord, have mercy. Lord, give me a strength.
Jesus help me," and all that, see?

And I could hear all this as the cops was	coming up the stairs, and they pulled the sheet back and said, "You're James Cameron?" I said, "Yeah." They said, "Get up, the chief of police wants to see you." So I got up, sat on the edge of the bed, and I started putting my clothes on. And one of the cops said, "Did you tell your mother what you and the	boys did tonight?" I said, "I haven't done nothing." And one of them said, "The hell you haven't." Said, "You went out here and you raped a white woman and you killed a white man." "Shot a white man," he said, not killed him. Said, "You shot a white man." And I said, "Oh no, I don't know nothing about that." And I began to wonder	what really had happened. So they took me downstairs and carried me right on out the door.

And my mother was begging them to take her instead of me. She felt like it was somehow her fault that I was in trouble. And I can see my mother standing there
in the doorway right now, crying and begging the police to take her instead of me. You know, we had a kerosene lamp and I could see the silhouette of her body at a door as they took me out, and I looked back. And I told Mom, "Don't worry, I'll be right back." Biggest lie I ever told in my life.

- Narrator: The Ku Klux Klan, the lynchings, the cross burnings, often thought to be	a Southern phenomenon from after the Civil War. But this footage is from the 1920s, a time when the Klan was at its height. In 1925, they were able to summon some 50,000 members for a March in Washington. They were a powerful force on our nation's political scene, and the locus of their power was the state of Indiana.
Some historians contend that up to 1/3 of the white male population of Indiana
belonged to the Klan, that they controlled the legislature and other state offices.
In the 1920s, the National Grand Dragon of the Klan, D.C. Stephenson, called Indiana home. Stephenson said, "I am the law in Indiana."

[gentle guitar music]

Cameron was taken from his home to the police station	for questioning.

- I was frightened out of my wits. And one policeman was standing	on the back of my chair and all at once, I was	hit upside the head and I saw a million stars.
I fell down on the floor and I was just laying there like a fish out of water, just trying to gasp for breath. And they were kicking me and beating me and everything. And finally somebody said, "Halt, stop it." And they stopped it, and they grabbed me and slammed me back in the chair like I was a snake or something.
And then the sheriff put the paper in front of me and said, "Sign this." And my mother had always told us kids before we sign anything, always read it. And like an idiot, being foolish again, I got down like I wanted to read what it was that he's written, and I got hit upside the head again. And this cop that hit me said,
"Damn it," said, "the sheriff	said sign it, not read it." And with a trembling hand,	I signed what it was.

- Narrator: Accused through the confession of attempted murder and the rape of a white woman, Cameron was then taken here, the Grant County jail in Marion. Cameron and his friends, Tommy and Abe, were kept in separate cells, separate cell blocks.

- They had Abe in this	cell block over here and they had Tommy in this cell block over here. Then they went upstairs and put me in the cell block right up over Tommy's cell block on the first floor.

- Narrator: This prison	was built like a fortress. The brick walls are three feet thick. Escape would seem impossible.

- Now this is the cell block where they had me incarcerated. They had 29 Black men in here and 4 white men crowded in this little space. So I come in here and I lay down on that dirty tick mattress. It didn't have any springs in it or nothing, you know. And I cried till no more tears could come.

[gentle guitar music]

- Narrator: The lesson was fear. It was taught by intimidation. Lynching victims were seldom just lynched. After a lynching, their bodies were often used for target practice. Sometimes thousands	of rounds were fired. Their bodies were often mutilated, often burned. Sometimes when the Klan ran through Black neighborhoods,
they would leave small whips, miniature coffins, as a kind of calling card. They were truly scare tactics cloaked in rituals of humiliation meant to impose their social order, white over Black.

[gentle guitar music]

- I came in in the morning, about 2 o'clock in the morning, and the crowd began gathering about 8 o'clock that morning, about six hours later, people began to form circles around the jail.

- Narrator: At 1:30 in the afternoon on Thursday, August 7th, Claude Deeter died from his wounds.

- I was here when they came back and shook me and said, "Hey, wake up, wake up. They're throwing bricks	through the window. They're trying to break in."
I got up out of my cell block, I ran up the cell block as quick as I could,
and I ran out into the bullpen here.

- Narrator: By 8:00 that evening, a crowd of some 10,000 had surrounded the jail in Marion and demanded the prisoners, Thomas Shipp, Abram Smith, and James Cameron.
They stormed the jail, ignoring pleas and tear gas bombs, to search for the prisoners. They used wooden traffic	signs and sledges to beat down eight doors to reach the prisoners.

- I saw the mob when they brought Tommy and Abe out through the front door of the jail. They beat Tommy and drug him around to the side and hung him on the jail window where, the cell block	where Abe was incarcerated. And then they came back and they got Abe out and took him, beat him to death, drug him up to the courthouse square, which is just a block away. Then they came back and took Tommy down
from the jail window and drug him through the streets. I could see them dragging him through the streets. The police, instead of clearing the street of rabble-rousers, they were making the crowd get back so they could take Tommy up to the jail without any hindrance.

And then they came back to get me. Now, the mob went over to this 16-year-old-boy
and asked him what his name was, and he said, "My name is Charles Hands." And they asked me my name, and I said, "My name is Henry Burton." I wasn't about to tell them	my name was James Cameron. So just then the sheriff came in, he had two guns.
One was in his holster and one was hanging down on his side. It was hot that summer night, August 7th, 1930. And he said, "Come on, let's	get the hell out of here.
So you done hung two of them," said, "That ought to be enough to satisfy you."
And then they said, "Cameron	ain't in there anyway," said, "Come on, let's get the hell out of here." So he went out with the mob.

So the mob came back, told the crowd, said, "Cameron's not in here." And they said, "Yes, he is, and we want him." And then they began to chant	for me like a football player. "We want Cameron, we want Cameron, we want Cameron." And I could feel, my body feel like I was encased in a ice suit. I was just cold all over.
And to think they	wanted me that bad. People whom I thought	were my friends,
people whose lawn I'd mowed, and whose cars I'd washed, and whose errands I'd run for 'em, and whose shoes I'd shined. People I knew were in the mob, neighbors.

- Narrator: Lynchings were not secret things to be hidden away. Often a public spot was chosen. A tree that had been used previously or a railroad bridge, so that everyone could see	the body as they drove by. Sometimes other Black people would be forced to watch as a lynching victim's	body was burned. Lynching was not a private crime. It was meant to be a public horror.

[gentle guitar music]

- But here was 10,000 to 15,000 people out there, screaming	for my blood. And then they came back to get me. And I could hear 'em coming up the stairs and there was no place to hide. I didn't even have time to pray. The leaders of the mob broke into the jail, opened the cell block where I was. And that guy said, "Cameron's in here," and said, "if you don't tell us	where he is," said, "we're gonna lynch every	goddam one of you." Said, "We're gonna take you out and lynch you all."
Finally, he gave the order to	take all of us out and hang us.

So this boy's father, this 16-year-old boy's father, he fell down on his knees and he said, "No, Mr. White Folks,	please don't do that." And this white man took and hit him and knocked him down on the floor and told him, said, "Damn it," said, "you bastard, you better tell us where he is. You don't, we're gonna lynch every damn one of you." That goes on for 5 or 10 minutes, just a regular bedlam.
Confusion. Oh, it was awful. You had to see it, to have lived it, to believe it.

[sniffling]

Finally, this man, the father	of the 16-year-old boy, beaten out of his senses, scared to death of white people. He raised up off the floor, he said, "There he is right there." And his hand was shaking just like that when he said, "There he is." And when he said that, the mob turned towards me and they began to close in on me, and all hell broke loose.

- Narrator: The mob turned on Cameron. As the crowd beat him and dragged him through the halls, he noticed the police cleared a path so he could be more easily moved to the courthouse square.

- I look into the	faces of the people as they were beating me up there, and I was pleading for help and nobody offered help or nothing. And they finally got me up to the tree and there was Tommy and	Abe hanging on the tree. And then they said, "Where's the rope?" They got the rope, and they	put the rope around my neck and I kind of blacked	out momentarily.

I remember my mother had told	us to always pray to God, and she brought us up that way, to pray. And I still pray to this very day the way my mother	taught me to pray. And she said, "Always ask for forgiveness." And I said, "Lord, forgive me of my sins and have mercy on me." And just then, after they had pushed me up onto the tree where Tommy and Abe were hanging and were getting ready to hoisten me up, a voice, a mysterious voice, rang out from heaven and said, "Take this boy back. He had nothing to	do with any killing."

And instantly, it seemed like everything stood perfectly still, like I was in a petrified forest. And I could see strips of, like rolls of wallpaper, like in a negative photography studio. And I could see images through	these strips of negatives that was hanging all around me. And I couldn't tell whether the people were white or Black. And that happened just like an eternity and then back to consciousness again. And then all at once, the hands that had killed became soft and kind and tender, and they removed the rope from around my neck, and I was able to stagger back to the jail.

[gentle guitar music]

- Narrator: From news accounts about August 7th, 1930: "After the hanging, the mob attempted to burn the body of Shipp, hanging 25 feet in the air. Rubbish and packing boxes were piled under the corpse and ignited. His body hung too high to be touched by the flames. The bodies, almost nude and stiffened, were lowered to the ground at 5:26 this morning by Sheriff Campbell and his deputies. Earlier in the night, Coroner O.L. Stout of Upland had started to cut	the bodies down, but was warned away. The bodies were to be left	hanging there until noon today,
as an example, he was told." After he was returned to the jail, Cameron was hustled to the side entrance and taken to Huntington, Indiana for safekeeping.

[wind whooshing]

History is, in part, an	exercise in remembering what we choose to remember, how we place events in our common past, how we place events. Some news accounts placed the uncle of Mary Ball, Claude Deeter's fiancée, at the scene. They claim he had called out to intercede to save Cameron.

Here is how the events	in Marion concluded. Cameron served four years as an accessory to the murder of Claude Deeter. Mary Ball stated during the trial
that Cameron had fled the scene before the shooting started. She also said that she had never been raped. No one in the lynching mob ever served time for their crimes. The sheriff was exonerated. And in the end, Cameron moved from Marion
to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he married, had a family, and was never again in trouble with the law. But the memory of Marion persisted.

- Cameron: You have to know what happened in the past, of what's happening now so you can plan for the future. If you don't know your past, you're a nobody.
You're a nobody if you don't have a history.

- Narrator: Cameron wrote a book about his experiences called A Time of Terror,
and he hopes to document the experiences of others with the creation of what he calls America's Black Holocaust Museum. It will be centered in Milwaukee and it will be a permanent record, a way of remembering this awful history. Cameron hopes to open a branch of the museum here to let this jail stand witness to the events of August 7th, 1930, a lynching in Marion, one chapter in a larger story.

[gentle guitar music]

[light music]

- Announcer: Funding for this	program has been provided in part by the Corporation	for Public Broadcasting and by the financial support of viewers like you.