"The films that influenced me were so disparate that there's almost no pattern." -- James Cameron
James Cameron (February 23, 1914 – June 11, 2006) was an American civil rights activist. In the 1940s, he founded three chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He also served as Indiana's State Director of the Office of Civil Liberties for eight years during early integration. After moving to Wisconsin, in 1988 he founded America's Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee.
At his death, he was the only known survivor of a lynching attempt.
"I actually started as a model builder and quickly progressed into production design, which made sense because I could draw and paint. But I kept watching that guy over there who was moving the actors around and setting up the shots.""I blame it on Walt Disney, where animals are given human qualities. People don't understand that a wild animal is not something that is nice to pat. It can seriously harm you.""I certainly didn't think of myself as gifted. The standards for being gifted in my environment were if you were good in Little League or if you were good in football.""I do an awful lot of scuba diving. I love to be on the ocean, under the ocean. I live next to the ocean.""I had pictured myself as a filmmaker but I had never pictured myself as a director if that makes any sense at all.""I had read tons of science fiction. I was fascinated by other worlds, other environments. For me, it was fantasy, but it was not fantasy in the sense of pure escapism.""I like the evening in India, the one magic moment when the sun balances on the rim of the world, and the hush descends, and ten thousand civil servants drift homeward on a river of bicycles, brooding on the Lord Krishna and the cost of living.""I lived in a small town. It was 2,000 people in Canada. A little river that went through it and we swam in the - you know, there was a lot of water around. Niagara Falls was about four or five miles away.""I love short trips to New York; to me it is the finest three-day town on earth.""I mean, you have to be able - you have to have made the commitment within yourself to do whatever it takes to get the job done and to try to inspire other people to do it, because obviously the first rule is you can't do it by yourself.""I was always fascinated by engineering. Maybe it was an attempt maybe to get my father's respect or interest, or maybe it was just a genetic love of technology, but I was always trying to build things.""I watched a couple of really bad directors work, and I saw how they completely botched it up and missed the visual opportunities of the scene when we had put things in front of them as opportunities. Set pieces, props and so on.""If you wait until the right time to have a child you'll die childless, and I think film making is very much the same thing. You just have to take the plunge and just start shooting something even if it's bad.""It took me a long time to realize that you have to have a bit of an interlanguage with actors. You have to give them something that they can act with.""It'll be all of our efforts together. It won't won't ever be exactly the way I imagined it. And that is, I think, an important lesson as well, is that in any group enterprise it's going to be the sum total of the group.""My mother was a housewife but she was also an artist. My father was an electrical engineer.""Pick up a camera. Shoot something. No matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister star in it. Put your name on it as director. Now you're a director. Everything after that you're just negotiating your budget and your fee.""So much of literary sci-fi is about creating worlds that are rich and detailed and make sense at a social level. We'll create a world for people and then later present a narrative in that world.""The film industry is about saying 'no' to people, and inherently you cannot take 'no' for an answer.""The magic doesn't come from within the director's mind, it comes from within the hearts of the actors.""There are many talented people who haven't fulfilled their dreams because they over thought it, or they were too cautious, and were unwilling to make the leap of faith.""There is a hugely underserved population out there... those who are the least capable of paying pay the highest.""What are you gonna do, talk the alien to death?""You have to not listen to the nay sayers because there will be many and often they'll be much more qualified than you and cause you to sort of doubt yourself.""You know, in the film making business no one ever gives you anything."
Cameron was born February 23, 1914 in La Crosse, Wisconsin to James Herbert Cameron and Vera Carter. After his father left the family, they moved to Birmingham, Alabama, then to Marion, Indiana when James was 14 and his mother remarried.
Lynching attempt
In August, 1930, when Cameron was 16 years old, he and two older teenage friends, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, were charged in Marion with the murder of a young white man, Claude Deeter, during an armed robbery attempt, and with the rape of his girlfriend. (The latter charge was dropped.) Cameron said he ran away before the man was killed. They were quickly caught and charged with the murder.
Cameron and his two friends were taken from where they were being held in jail and lynched by a mob of 2,000-5,000 at the Grant County Courthouse Square. They were hanged from a tree on the square. Cameron witnessed the deaths of his friends but somehow was saved. In later years he said his neck was scarred from the rope. He heard someone saying he was not guilty, and was taken down before he died from hanging. No one from the mob was arrested or charged with the murders of Cameron’s friends.
Cameron was convicted at trial in 1931 as an accessory to the murder of Deeter, and served four years of his sentence in a state prison. After Cameron was paroled, he moved to Detroit, Michigan, where he worked at Stroh Brewery Company and attended Wayne State University.
Cameron studied to become a boiler engineer and worked until he was 65. At the same time, he continued to study lynchings, race and civil rights in America and trying to teach others.
Because of his personal experience, Cameron dedicated his life to promoting civil rights, racial unity and equality. While he worked in a variety of jobs, his civic commitment was shown by his founding three chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) during the 1940s ... a time when the Ku Klux Klan was still active in the Midwest although its numbers had decreased since its peak in the 1920s. Cameron established and became the first president of the NAACP Madison County chapter in Anderson, Indiana.
Additionally, Cameron served as the Indiana State Director of Civil Liberties from 1942...1950. In this capacity, Cameron reported to Governor of Indiana Henry Shricker on violations of the “equal accommodations” laws designed to end segregation. During his eight-year tenure, Cameron investigated more than 25 incidents of civil rights infractions. He faced violence and death threats because of his work.
By the early 1950s, the emotional toll of threats led Cameron to search for a safer home for his wife and five children. Planning to move to Canada, they decided on Milwaukee when he found work there. There Cameron continued his work in civil rights by assisting in protests to end segregated housing in the city. He also participated in both marches on Washington in the 1960s, the first with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the second with Dr. King’s widow Coretta and Rev. Jesse Jackson.
Cameron studied history on his own and lectured on the African-American experience. In 1982 he published his autobiography. From 1955 to 1989, Cameron published hundreds of articles and booklets detailing civil rights and occurrences of racial injustices, including "What is Equality in American Life?"; "The Lingering Problem of Reconstruction in American Life: Black Suffrage"; and "The Second Civil Rights Bill".
After being inspired by a visit with his wife to the Yad Vashem memorial in Israel, Cameron founded America's Black Holocaust Museum in 1988. He used material from his collections to document the struggles of African Americans in the United States, from slavery through lynchings, and civil rights. When he first started collecting materials about slavery, he kept it in his basement. He worked with others to build support for the museum. He was aided by philanthropist Daniel Bader.
His institution, America's Black Holocaust Museum, started as a grassroots effort. It is now one of the largest African-American museums in the country. In 2008, the museum's board of directors announced that the museum would be closed temporarily because of financial problems.
In 1991 Cameron was officially pardoned by the state of Indiana.
He and his wife Virginia Hamilton had five children. At the time of his death, two sons, David and James, had died. He was survived by his wife Virginia and three children: Virgil, Walter and Dolores Cameron, plus numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
