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“A Time of Terror: A Survivor’s Story”– Excerpts from Dr. Cameron’s Memoir
Excerpts from Dr. James Cameron’s memoir, “A Time of Terror: A Survivor’s Story,” with Editor’s Notes. A new excerpt is posted each week during the 6-week crowd-funding campaign to raise the money necessary to publish the book – the only known memoir by a lynching survivor.
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What Is The Black Holocaust?
The four hundred-year history of captured Africans and their descendants has many similarities with the Holocaust experiences of European Jews – and other victims of mass atrocities. This exhibit explains those similarities and the reasons that ABHM’s founder believed it important to use the term “holocaust” in its title.
Read MoreScholars sketch bleak economic picture for black Americans
By Michael A. Fletcher, The Washington Post Scholars gathered for the African American Economic Summit at Howard University on Friday sketched an alarming picture of the financial ills afflicting the black community even as the nation recovers from the recession. The white-black wealth disparity is more than 20 to 1. Black homeownership has declined. Black…
Read MoreElmer Jackson – Working Man, Beloved Son and Brother
Warren Read, great-grandson of one of the Duluth lynchers, and author of The Lyncher in Me, provides information about Mr. Jackson’s life. Mr. Read did extensive research about the victims and searched for their relatives. He was able to meet Elmer Jackson’s relatives.
Read MoreTexas Forces Voters to Prove They’re Alive
By theRoot.com After courts twice cited the Voting Rights Act in rulings that blocked Texas voter-ID laws on the grounds that they were discriminatory, proponents of such efforts have recently begun executing a new strategy: requiring voters to submit written verification that they are alive before arriving at the polls. The strategy is part of a 2011…
Read MoreThe Museum’s Four Themes: Remembrance, Resistance, Redemption, and Reconciliation
Learn about ABHvM’s Four Themes – Remembrance, Resistance, Redemption, and Reconciliation – and how they thread through the museum’s exhibits.
Read MoreInner City Teens Win Their 2nd Polo Championship
In a sport associated more with royalty and the well-to-do suburban country club set than the inner city, a team of black kids from Philadelphia reign supreme. On Sunday, a team from Philadelphia’s Work to Ride polo program captured the United States Polo Association Tournament Championship in Charlottesville, Va., taking the crown for the second…
Read MoreGriots At The Museum
Griots are the oral historians of West Africa, who travel from town to town as living newspapers, carrying in their heads an incredible store of local history and current events. At ABHM we call the curators of our exhibits “griots,” because they tell our history and respond to visitors’ comments and questions in the Comments section at the foot of each new exhibit.
Read MoreDr. James Cameron, Museum Founder and Lynching Survivor
James Cameron was just sixteen in 1930 when he and two other teens were lynched in Marion, Indiana. His friends were killed but, miraculously, James survived. He spent a year in jail awaiting trial for the murder that triggered the lynching. He was sentenced as an accessory before the fact and served four years in the Indiana Reformatory with hardened adult criminals.
Cameron believed God saved him for a purpose. He left prison resolved to do something “worthwhile and God-like.” He spent the rest of his long life working to help us understand this tragic chapter of American history. Dr. Cameron showed us how to cope with our painful legacy through love, justice, and reconciliation.
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