His Story: Terror. Truth. Love. Legacy.

THE UNSHAKABLE devotion many have for America’s Black Holocaust Museum’s founder, James Cameron, comes from experiencing his genuine love for humanity. But his compassion came at a considerable price.

At 16 years old in 1930, Cameron watched as his two friends, charged with murder, were pulled from their cells, brutalized and hanged to death by a white mob. “I was to be the third man; they wanted all three of us hanging up on the tree that night,” an aging Cameron reflects on that night in Marion, Indiana, in the short film Sweet Messenger.

His life spared after a rare appeal to reason and justice by the sheriffs who abetted the hangings, Cameron believed God’s will for him was to effect change through civil rights activism. But by age 38, after numerous death threats, he packed up his family for a new life in Canada. Along the way, he stopped in Milwaukee, and the rest is, yes, literally history.

Milwaukee is where Cameron (born in La Crosse) would live out his golden years; publish his autobiography, A Time of Terror: A Survivor’s Story; and, after an inspiring trip to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem, birth an extraordinary idea to serve as a living testament to his life and the dark history of the United States. He called it America’s Black Holocaust Museum.

At 70 years of age, Cameron opened the museum in 1984. Into his 90s, he’d share his shocking story with visitors, advocating for education, understanding, forgiveness and love.

“Dad’s idea was to communicate. We’ll always keep his ideas … at the forefront,” says Virgil Cameron, the founder’s son and a museum board member. “Everything we do, we do with him in mind.”