“A Time of Terror: A Survivor’s Story”– Excerpts from Dr. Cameron’s Memoir

By Dr. Fran Kaplan, Editor, A Time of Terror by James Cameron

LifeWrites Press, a division of the Dr. James Cameron Legacy Foundation, released a new, expanded edition of Dr. James Cameron’s memoir on February 25, 2016. In May 2016 book received a Silver Medal for Best Nonfiction, Great Lakes Region in IPPY’s (the Independent Publishers Association) international competition.

The new 3rd edition contains five never-published chapters by Dr. Cameron, fifty vintage photographs, and annotations to help younger readers understand the era’s slang expressions and historical references.

A Time of Terror: A Survivor’s Story is an uplifting story of a black boy’s coming-of-age during the Jim Crow Era in the North. It is a one-of-a-kind historical document full of anecdotes, written in an engaging, often humorous, conversational style. These stories reveal Cameron’s courageous journey from his careless immature youth through an unspeakable trauma to a most admirable manhood as courageous early civil rights activist and loving husband and father.

Excerpts

Chapter 11: Big Emotions

I did pray at times. But hate had been growing in me so much that it seemed all I could do was hate. That hatred was for white people in general. No doubt, that poison in my system added to the aches and pains in my head.

I imagined myself out of prison paying back white people for every crime they had committed against me and other black people. I wanted to kill the white bastards for using force, violence, fraud and deceit; for channeling black people’s lives into narrow choices, deliberately creating a way of life outside the pale of American society; for not regarding black people as human beings or an integral part of the community group as they did other ethnic groups. I was nurturing an urge to kill and keep on killing white people. 

Editor’s Note: Clearly James never acted on these feelings. Later he would come to believe that hate was a poison that destroys the body and soul. In revising the original manuscript over many many years, he inserted the insights he came to as a grown man who looks back at the emotions of his youth.

Chapter 7: Say It Isn’t So!

But the more I tried the more my mind kept racing back over the countless stories about Ku Klux Klan treatment of black people, stories that every black person knows by the time he or she is five years old. By the time you were sixteen, you were well versed in what a “nigger” was in America.

Editor’s Note: Today, even though the Ku Klux Klan is relatively toothless, most black sixteen year olds are just as well-versed in the place of black boys in American society.

Epilogue

Through reflection on life-experience and participation in a healing community, the individual arrives at a new awareness, a new sense of self, a feeling of “I can” when others say “I can’t.” The ability to fly, even soar, has been revealed. Perhaps, if this newly discovered inner source of power is fully unleashed, the horizon for future growth toward liberation is suddenly available….

I forgive those who have harmed me and Abe and Tom, realizing I can never forget the traumatic events that took place that night.

Editor’s Note: Despite the unspeakable traumas of the lynching night and the five years of incarceration with grown men, young Jimmie emerged determined to do something positive and “God-like” with his life – to become better, not bitter.

Dr. Cameron was aware of how holding onto to hate destroys the hater. He used to say, “Hate eats into the body and poisons the body from within. But if you have love in your heart, you can blossom like a flower in the sun every day.” At the same time, he believed that “the truth shall set you free,” that “stories give a context to our collective pilgrimage.” Therefore, he taught that we must “forgive but never forget” our history.