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| Photo By Lawrence Beitler, 1930. Fair Use Image |
August 7, 1930, Marion Indiana ─
A White mob attacked the Grant County Courthouse tonight intent on murder. They
were reacting to the arrests of three Black teens for the alleged shooting of White
man Claude Deeter and raping his fiancée Mary Ball the night before. Deeter
died at the hospital from his gunshot wounds early this morning.
Grant County Sheriff Jacob
Campbell had arrested the three African American men that afternoon and had
them in jail. By evening word of both the murder of Deeter and the Rape of
Ball had spread throughout the county and surrounding communities and White
men started coming into town. Many of them had worked with Deeter in the
neighboring town of Fairmount. By late evening there appeared to be 1,000
people on the courthouse lawn, and they were in a frenzy.
Although Indiana was a northern
state it was no better than most Southern states during the Jim Crow era. There
were some 250 “Sundown Towns” in Indiana a reflection of deep-seated racism. In
fact, just a few years earlier the state was the power base for the Ku Klux Klan,
In 1925 the Klan held most of the political power in the state and had 250,000
members. Although by 1930 the Klan had lost much of that power it wasn’t due to
an epiphany by the population regarding their Negro neighbors but a reaction to
being affiliated with Grand Dragon David Curtis Stephenson. Stephenson had
been convicted of the abduction, rape, and murder of Madge Oberholtzer, a
state education official in 1925.
The Sundown Towns then were just
a natural outcome of the persistent prejudice in Indiana. The Sundown Town
designation was a community where law enforcement and town government agreed on
laws to remove anyone who was black (and in many cases Jews Greeks and other
Eastern or Southern Europeans) from the town. The core of this White mob seemed
to come from the factory town of Fairmount where they had supposedly worked
with Deeter, Fairmount was a Sundown Town. The Fairmount crowd was full of
White Supremacists.
The lynching of Blacks wasn’t unusual
in Indiana either with 21 previous lynchings in the state, so there was fertile
ground for racial violence by the night of August 7, 1930.
Word had spread to Indianapolis
and Fort Wayne that there would be a hanging that night and apparently, people
wanted to be there for the spectacle. By 8:30 that night, the crowd on the lawn
was estimated to be more than 5,000 people.
Realizing the intent of some in
the crown Sheriff Campbell and all his men stayed at the jail to protect the three
Black men in lock up. The crowd did not know that Ball had recanted
when asked to identify the men. While the rape of a White woman was probably an
even greater reason for a lynching than murder by this time it wouldn’t have
mattered the mob was heated and looking for blood.
At 8:30 pm about 20 White men
rushed the jail and attempted to break out the men. The sheriff and his men
repelled them with tear gas and warning shots. Word then went out and soon crowbars and
sledgehammers were shared, and 200 men attacked the jail breaking down the wall.
Thomas Shipp was then pulled free and passed to the mob. Shipp started screaming
his innocence as the mob beat him and dragged him to a tree where they strung him
up. Abram Smith was taken out of jail the same way. Smith fought back and
at one point was able to remove the noose but the crowd further beat him and
broke both his arms.
Then, the mob pulled James
Cameron out and took him to the same offending tree, however,
someone in the crowd called out, “Take this boy back. He had nothing to do with
any raping or killing.” And stunningly the mob released Cameron to the sheriff.
It is believed that both Shipp
and Smith were already dead from the savage beating when the mob strung them up
from the tree. Some members of the crowd still had not gotten their fill of
blood and murder and tried to rally the full crowd to invade the Negro section
of Marion and force out the population and burn it to the ground. The arrival
of additional police from Indianapolis, Muncie, and Fort Wayne put that idea to
rest, as well as the National Guard having been ordered by the governor.
On Aug. 9th a press conference
was held, and it was announced that the Sheriff and the Marion Police Chief,
two assistant state attorney generals, and Grant County prosecutor would be
opening an inquiry to try and find individuals responsible. Also, Flossie
Bailey, local NAACP director in Marion, and Indiana Attorney General James M.
Ogden worked to gain indictments, but they soon found a conspiracy of silence.
The grand jury refused to examine the testimony and brought no charges.
Survivor James Cameron did go on
trial and was convicted for participating in the killing of Claude Deeter and
spent four years in prison. At twenty-one, He left prison determined,
"to pick up the loose threads of my life, weave them into something
beautiful, worthwhile and God-like.” He went on to become an important Civil
Rights activist in Indiana. He founded four NAACP chapters and worked for
voting rights. His memoir, “A Time of Terror: A Survivor's Story” was
published in 1982. Then in 1988, he founded America’s Black Holocaust Museum. He
was pardoned by the state of Indiana in 1991 for his participation in the
Deeter murder.
James Cameron’s life was not the
only legacy of these murders. Lawrence Beitler's iconic photograph of the two swaying bodies sold several 1,000 times in the next week until
the police stopped the sale. Beitle's photograph inspired Abel Meeropol, pseudonym Lewis
Allan, to write the poem “Bitter Fruit” which he later put to music and renamed
“Strange Fruit” which became the signature song of Billie Holiday and has been
covered by Nina Simone, UB40, Annie Lennox and others. Strange Fruit became the
anthem for the anti-lynching movement and an important part of the Civil Rights
movement.
Sources:
https://www.abhmuseum.org/an-iconic-lynching-in-the-north/
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/lynching-thomas-shipp-abram-smith-1930/
https://www.abhmuseum.org/about/dr-cameron-founder-lynching-survivor/
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/marion-indiana-lynching-1930/
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