In 1930 there were some 250 “Sundown Towns” in Indiana a reflection of deep-seated, continuing prejudice. These were towns where law enforcement and town government agreed to laws to remove anyone who was black from the town. Historically there had been 21 previous lynchings in the state, so there was fertile ground for racial violence by the night of August 7, 1930.
On the night of Aug 6th, a 23rd-year-old man named Claude Deeter and his fiancée Mary Bell had been attacked. Deeter was shot and he died at the hospital in the early morning. Ball reported that she had been raped and said it was four Black men who did the heinous crime. By afternoon Grant County Sheriff Jacob Campbell had arrested four young African American men and had them in jail.
Word of the crime and the arrests had been spreading among local communities and by late evening the lawn of the jail and courthouse in Marion a mob estimated at 10,000 to 15,000 angry white people had gathered. Word had spread that there would be a hanging that night and apparently, people wanted to be there for the spectacle.
Although there was great menace oozing from the crowd Sheriff Campbell and all his men stayed at the jail to protect the men in lock up. What the crowd did not know was that Ball had recanted when asked to identify the men. It probably wouldn’t have mattered because the mob was heated and looking for blood.
First, they attempted to break in and steal the men from their cells. The sheriff and his men repelled the first attack. The mob redirected themselves and got crowbars and sledgehammers and quickly made a hole in the wall where the mob pulled out a man named Thomas Shipp. The crowd pulled Shipp screaming his innocence to a tree on the courthouse lawn, as they beat him and drug him to the tree where they strung him up. They turned their attention to Abram Smith, Smith tried to fight back and at one point was able to remove the noose but the crowd further beat him and broke both his arms.
Finally, the mob pulled James Cameron out and they were taking 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.” With blood lust sated the mob allowed Cameron to return to jail, where he was evacuated by the sheriff to a neighboring county.
The mob had moved the body of Shipp to the same tree as Smith and had tried to burn them but were unable to. It took hours for the massive crowd to disperse, some of them taking souvenirs
James Cameron was convicted for participating in the killing of Claude Deeter and spent four years in prison. He left prison at the age of twenty-one 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. He founded several NAACP chapters and worked for voting rights. His memoir, “A Time of Terror: A Survivor's Story” was published in 1982, and 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.
Even with multiple photographs taken of the lynching, primarily by local photographer and eye witness statements, Flossie Bailey, a local NAACP official in Marion, and Attorney General James M. Ogden worked to gain indictments but could not. The grand jury refused to examine the testimony and brought no charges.
The iconic photograph of the two swaying bodies taken by Lawrence Beitler was sold several 1,000 times in the next week and it inspired Abel Meeropol to write the poem “Bitter Fruit” which he later put to music and renamed “Strange Fruit” which became a 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://www.abhmuseum.org/about/dr-cameron-founder-lynching-survivor/
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/marion-indiana-lynching-1930/
Detail of photo by Lawrence Beitler, Fair use image
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