On Feb. 10, nearly 600 students filled the Student Union Ballroom to listen to the descriptive tale by Patrick Sims, “A Lynching Survivor’s Story”, which he said was “America’s Darkest Hour.”

  President Dr. Patrick Schloss opened up the event with remarks that were inspired in awe of the high outcome of students who attended.

  “Did you ever think that we would have this many students show up?” he said. “This school wasn’t even integrated when I was 14 years old. It is our incumbent responsibility to listen to one man’s story who escaped lynching.”

 Sims, the event speaker, is the Founding Director of the Theatre for Cultural and Social Awareness and is also an associate professor in the theatre and drama department at the University of Wisconsin Madison.

  He was inspired to write the story, “ 10 Perfect: A Lynching Survivor’s Story,” through his determination of keeping James Cameron, the actual lynching survivor’s story, alive—not to serve as a reminder of the painful past, but to empower the public through education of a true history that has not been watered down.

 Sims met Cameron at America’s Black Holocaust Museum, where he first learned of the James Cameron story. Since Sims met Cameron, he has spent the last several years of his life sharing this story all over the nation.

 On Aug. 7, 1930, three young black men, Abram Smith, Thomas Ship and James Cameron ages 16, 18 and 19 were accused of raping a white woman and killing a white man.  
 Although Cameron had absolutely nothing to do with these accusations, it was his word against a white man’s. 

 In Marion, Indiana, over 5,000 white people, mainly members of the Klan, came from all over Indiana in excitement to attend the “neck tie party”, which was code for lynching. 
 Abram Smith, Thomas Ship, and James Cameron were the “guests of honor” at this “Neck Tie Party”. 

 Thomas Ship and Abram Smith were lynched first, and then it was Cameron’s turn. As James Cameron had a near death experience, and was almost at the point of blacking out from the lack of oxygen from the rope around his neck, it was a sheriff’s words that would change his life forever.

 “Let him go, he had nothing to do with it,” the sheriff said.

The branch was b-roken and Cameron was released from a lynching of which he barely survived.

 Before the life-changing words were spoken, the crowd was celebrating the death of the two men who were lynched prior to Cameron, and in a sense, the mob of 5,000 white people seemed uncontrollable.

 However, when the sheriff spoke those words, the crowd was silenced.  The crowd parted and silently watched as Cameron crawled back to the jail cell from which he was originally taken from in order to be lynched.  

 There a Catholic officer on duty prayed for Cameron. 

 Cameron ended up serving a four year sentence for his alleged crime. He did not live to see Sims debut his own life story, which was exactly six months to the day after James Cameron died in 2006.

Although Cameron was unable to tell his own story, Sims gave VSU students a personal testimony through his discussions with him.

“The only reason I’m here is because of a broken branch and a sheriff that believed in me,” said Cameron. “Whether it was a miracle or not doesn’t matter, the point is I’m still here. I feel as though my life was spared to tell my story, because people need to know the truth. ”

For more information on this story, you can check out James Cameron’s book, A Time of Terror.