Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Image of a Hanging Tree
There are those images that are engraved into our brains, like indelible watermarks, images that preserve the most memorable people and events of our lives.
For me, one of those images is of James "Herb" Cameron's hand brushing across a wide old stump on the lawn around the county courthouse in Marion, Indiana. It is a twenty-eight-year-old image in my mind, which now has trouble remember what it knew twenty-eight minutes ago. But Cameron's coffee-brown hand at the faded stump of that infamous elm tree has survived all those years, and always will because it was one of the most chilling moments of my long journalism career.
Cameron, who died earlier this month in Milwaukee, was the person who, at the age of sixteen, survived one of the ugliest and most publicized racial lynchings in America's long history of such atrocities. He escaped only because an anonymous voice in the lynch mob crowd shouted out just before the mob was going to hang Cameron beside two of his acquaintances on a limb of the elm tree there on the central square of downtown Marion. "Take this boy back; he had nothing to do with any raping or shooting of anybody," the voice, which has never been identified to this day, urged. The mob, its bloodlust perhaps satisfied already, took Cameron back to the county jail.
I saw his hand touch the old stump in 1978, forty-eight years after the lynchings of Tom Shipp and Abram Smith. We had located Cameron, the black youth who had narrowly escaped the last multiple racial lynching north of the Mason-Dixon Line, with the help of one of his relatives who still lived in Marion, and were able to persuade him to return to the scene of that traumatic moment. It was the centerpiece of my article revisiting the lynching of August 7, 1930, which, for Marion, Indiana, was a date that, more than even Pearl Harbor, had lived in infamy in that medium-sized factory and God-fearing town. Most of the people I tried to talk to about that dark night in Marion's history -- both white and black -- urged me not to do the story at all, the feelings of shame and anger still too close to the surface after all those years.
I don't know what Cameron was feeling as we walked around the courthouse lawn. I only know I had cold chills running up and down my spine like runaway slaves. He seemed calm, at least for a sixty-four-year-old black man with short, graying hair who was revisiting his own indelible, horrific images. "I'll never forget how I felt that night," he said to me as he crouched down near the cleanly cut stump. "I was scared to death, shaking like a leaf."
Even he was speechless when it came to explaining how he happened to be spared by a mob that was in no mood to be forgiving after a young white man had been mortally shot and his girlfriend raped at a popular lover's lane at the south edge of town. "All I can say is that what I'd call a miracle happened that night."
Cameron, who said he had run away from the crime site when he recognized the young white man as a good customer at the shoeshine stand where Cameron worked and only heard the fatal gunshots from a mile or so down the road, later was convicted as an accessory before the fact to the crimes and served four years in the state reformatory. He lived in Anderson, Indiana, after his release, and then in Milwaukee, where, by all reports, he worked hard and obeyed the law.
"That was my first and only brush with the law," Cameron said on that summer afternoon in 1978. "I haven't even had a parking ticket since."
What he did have was a vivid memory of the night he almost became a victim of racial hatred. He put a lot of it into a book, A Time of Terror, which he published in 1983. He also started what he called the Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee.
He was ninety-two when he died. James "Herb" Cameron not only cheated a lynch mob; he cheated the Reaper for longer probably than almost all of the people in that crazed mob.
So, Cameron is gone, and the tree of infamy is gone, too -- or at least sliced away as close to the earth as the tools of man can do that. But the legacies of both still stand -- tall and tainted with the blood of two young black men -- in the images that persist, even for people who weren't actual witnesses to the event.
Some are recent legacies -- from the horrid death of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas, in 1998, to the tasteless "tributes" to Strom Thurmond at his final official birthday party, to the subtle racial atrocities of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, to the tired and hungry immigrants from Mexico yearning to be free but ending up dead from hydration a few miles north of the American borders.
And some are like the one imprinted in my mind forever -- James Cameron's dark hand brushing across what was left, physically, of the hanging tree he saw up close but escaped. The figurative tree of racism is an old elm tree that can't ever be conveniently cut down with a chainsaw. James "Herb" Cameron knew this, better than most.
For me, one of those images is of James "Herb" Cameron's hand brushing across a wide old stump on the lawn around the county courthouse in Marion, Indiana. It is a twenty-eight-year-old image in my mind, which now has trouble remember what it knew twenty-eight minutes ago. But Cameron's coffee-brown hand at the faded stump of that infamous elm tree has survived all those years, and always will because it was one of the most chilling moments of my long journalism career.
Cameron, who died earlier this month in Milwaukee, was the person who, at the age of sixteen, survived one of the ugliest and most publicized racial lynchings in America's long history of such atrocities. He escaped only because an anonymous voice in the lynch mob crowd shouted out just before the mob was going to hang Cameron beside two of his acquaintances on a limb of the elm tree there on the central square of downtown Marion. "Take this boy back; he had nothing to do with any raping or shooting of anybody," the voice, which has never been identified to this day, urged. The mob, its bloodlust perhaps satisfied already, took Cameron back to the county jail.
I saw his hand touch the old stump in 1978, forty-eight years after the lynchings of Tom Shipp and Abram Smith. We had located Cameron, the black youth who had narrowly escaped the last multiple racial lynching north of the Mason-Dixon Line, with the help of one of his relatives who still lived in Marion, and were able to persuade him to return to the scene of that traumatic moment. It was the centerpiece of my article revisiting the lynching of August 7, 1930, which, for Marion, Indiana, was a date that, more than even Pearl Harbor, had lived in infamy in that medium-sized factory and God-fearing town. Most of the people I tried to talk to about that dark night in Marion's history -- both white and black -- urged me not to do the story at all, the feelings of shame and anger still too close to the surface after all those years.
I don't know what Cameron was feeling as we walked around the courthouse lawn. I only know I had cold chills running up and down my spine like runaway slaves. He seemed calm, at least for a sixty-four-year-old black man with short, graying hair who was revisiting his own indelible, horrific images. "I'll never forget how I felt that night," he said to me as he crouched down near the cleanly cut stump. "I was scared to death, shaking like a leaf."
Even he was speechless when it came to explaining how he happened to be spared by a mob that was in no mood to be forgiving after a young white man had been mortally shot and his girlfriend raped at a popular lover's lane at the south edge of town. "All I can say is that what I'd call a miracle happened that night."
Cameron, who said he had run away from the crime site when he recognized the young white man as a good customer at the shoeshine stand where Cameron worked and only heard the fatal gunshots from a mile or so down the road, later was convicted as an accessory before the fact to the crimes and served four years in the state reformatory. He lived in Anderson, Indiana, after his release, and then in Milwaukee, where, by all reports, he worked hard and obeyed the law.
"That was my first and only brush with the law," Cameron said on that summer afternoon in 1978. "I haven't even had a parking ticket since."
What he did have was a vivid memory of the night he almost became a victim of racial hatred. He put a lot of it into a book, A Time of Terror, which he published in 1983. He also started what he called the Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee.
He was ninety-two when he died. James "Herb" Cameron not only cheated a lynch mob; he cheated the Reaper for longer probably than almost all of the people in that crazed mob.
So, Cameron is gone, and the tree of infamy is gone, too -- or at least sliced away as close to the earth as the tools of man can do that. But the legacies of both still stand -- tall and tainted with the blood of two young black men -- in the images that persist, even for people who weren't actual witnesses to the event.
Some are recent legacies -- from the horrid death of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas, in 1998, to the tasteless "tributes" to Strom Thurmond at his final official birthday party, to the subtle racial atrocities of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, to the tired and hungry immigrants from Mexico yearning to be free but ending up dead from hydration a few miles north of the American borders.
And some are like the one imprinted in my mind forever -- James Cameron's dark hand brushing across what was left, physically, of the hanging tree he saw up close but escaped. The figurative tree of racism is an old elm tree that can't ever be conveniently cut down with a chainsaw. James "Herb" Cameron knew this, better than most.
