The Lynch Mob: A Personal Tale

ByABC News
February 23, 2005, 4:36 PM

Feb. 23, 2005 — -- James Cameron was a 16-year-old shoeshine boy in Marion, Ind., when an Aug. 6, 1930, incident -- and what he claims was divine intervention -- changed his life forever.

Cameron accepted a ride home that night in a 1926 Ford Roadster from his 18-year-old classmate, Tom Shipp. Another teen, 19-year-old Abram Smith, also was in the car.

By the end of the next night, Shipp and Smith would be dead -- beaten and then lynched by an angry mob. But Cameron escaped.

The three teenagers, all of whom were black, drove along the river. At some point, they came across a car and a white man named Claude Deeter, as well as an 18-year-old white woman named Mary Ball. Cameron said one of the other teenagers ordered him to rob the couple at gunpoint.

"I opened the door and I said, 'Stick them up,' and this white fellow gets out of the car, and he didn't recognize me because I had my hat pulled down," he recalled. "And I noticed him just like that. He was my friend, a real nice white fellow. I was his shoeshine boy.

"And his girlfriend got out of the car. Her face was so pale and lovely and frightened, and that scared me. So I took the gun, give it to one of my confederates. I said, 'Here, I'm not going to have anything to do with you guys.'

"And I left that scene of the crime. I had gone about two or three blocks when I heard some shots ring out -- bang, bang, bang. Well, I was foolish for being out there, but I sure in hell wasn't going to go back to see who was shooting who."

The three teens were arrested late that night and taken to the county jail, where they were held throughout the next day. By dusk, a rowdy crowd was gathering outside the jail, but the sheriff ordered his deputies not to use their weapons because women and children were in the crowd.

"I was still sore from the beating the police had given me," Cameron said. "Somebody came back and shook me and said, 'Wake up! Wake up! They're breaking the windows! They're trying to break into the jail!' And I got up and ran around the bullpen and looked out the window. From my second-floor perch, I could see the crowd below, and sure enough they were hollering, 'Turn them damn niggers over to us! We know how to treat them! We're going to hang every damn one of them!' "