Trailblazing America's Black Holocaust Museum poised to reopen

Near the end of his presidency, Barack Obama stood in front of one of the most spectacular museums ever erected on the National Mall and spoke about embracing hard truths.

“Yes, a clear-eyed view of history can make us uncomfortable,” he said at the opening of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. “It’ll shake us out of familiar narratives.”

In recent weeks, in Montgomery, Ala., overlooking the birthplace of the civil rights movement, a solemn memorial was unveiled that documents the lynching deaths of more than 4,400 African-Americans.

Related:Alabama memorial captures the scale of racial terror in the U.S.

There is a level of truth telling at the heart of these celebrated projects, both of which have attracted international headlines and massive crowds, that was preceded by a far less known museum in Milwaukee 30 years ago.

Without funding from Google or presidential accolades, America’s Black Holocaust Museum was founded by James Cameron, a survivor of one of the nation’s most notorious lynchings.

Cameron's museum was unique in the nation for its emphasis on hard truths. Decades before #BlackLivesMatter, for instance, Cameron drew a direct line from the history of lynchings to the shooting deaths of young black men by police officers.

Cameron “was a pioneer in articulating the legacy of America’s racial violence,” said Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, the nonprofit legal advocacy group that opened the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Alabama. “I consider him a huge influence and someone who inspired me enormously,” he added.

This fall, Cameron's prescient and potent museum, which shuttered a few years after its founder’s death in 2006, is slated to reopen in Milwaukee. It is part of the $17.7 million Historic Garfield Redevelopment project, led by Maures Development LLC and Jeffers & Co., which also includes apartments and commercial space.

A free public event Monday featuring actor and activist Danny Glover is part of a two-day celebration of the project and the museum. Glover is part of Sankofa, a social justice group founded in 2013 by Harry Belafonte that brings attention to worthy grassroots projects through the involvement of high-profile artists. 

Related:When America's Black Holocaust Museum first opened — in 1988

“Most of the time, when a museum closes, it doesn’t reopen,” said Ald. Milele Coggs, who said discussions about the future of the museum have been active for years at City Hall. Her first phone calls and meetings as an elected official were about it, she said.

The rebirth of America's Black Holocaust Museum prompts questions. What will it be without Cameron, whose presence and stories were so essential to it? Why did it take a decade of struggle to get it reopened? Are we more prepared to confront Cameron’s ideas today, in a time of national reckoning around issues of race?

To consider the museum's future we need to understand the terrible story that defined Cameron’s life.

A night of terror

He was just a youth when the mob threw a rope around his neck, pulled him to his feet and prepared to hang him from a maple tree between his two buddies, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith. A white crowd, perhaps 10,000 strong, had gathered around the local jail in Marion, Ind., after newspaper headlines and radio broadcasts throughout the Midwest reported rumors of the lynching.

The three young men were accused of murdering a white man, the result of a robbery gone wrong, but Cameron wasn’t part of the killing.

The 16-year-old Cameron was pelted with bricks and rocks as he was dragged from the jail to the tree. Children bit his legs. Policemen laughed and talked with those gathered, according to Cameron's accounts. 

A man named Lawrence Beitler was there to take photographs. He set up lights, cut branches from the trees so the bodies would be more visible and posed members of the white crowd.

Cameron prayed, asking God to forgive his sins, assuming he would die, according to his biography.

“Then, miraculously, the mob let him go, just let him walk away,” Cynthia Carr wrote in her 2006 book about the lynching and its impact on her hometown, “Our Town.” “He believed he was saved by divine intervention, sent back to us with news – our Ishmael. And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”

Cameron came so close to dying that night – Aug. 7, 1930 – that rope burns were left on his neck from the noose, Carr wrote.

While Cameron was innocent of the crimes and later pardoned by the state of Indiana, he spent four years unjustly imprisoned. That’s when he wrote down the story of his life and how he survived. When his notes were confiscated upon his release, he began again. He interviewed hundreds of people in Marion for the book.

“So this kid is in his early 20s comes back to the town where he was lynched and has the audacity to talk to people about what they saw that day,” said Reggie Jackson, who has been the head griot, or storyteller, for the museum for many years.

Discovering a vibrant Bronzeville

By the early 1950s, after doing social justice work and founding NAACP chapters in Indiana, Cameron and his wife, Virginia, were getting regular death threats and decided to move their family to Canada. On their way out of the country, they stopped in Milwaukee and discovered a tight-knit, vibrant black community in Bronzeville, with its corridor of black-owned businesses and jazz and blues clubs. Cameron, who had been born in La Crosse, decided to stay, and the couple spent the rest of their lives in Milwaukee.

For 45 years, Cameron tried to get his autobiography published. It was thought to be the only story of a lynching survivor shared publicly. After receiving hundreds of rejections from publishers, Cameron took out a second mortgage on his home and published the book himself, selling copies of "A Time of Terror" out of the trunk of his car.

A few years after that, he opened a small museum, initially in his basement, then in storefronts and eventually in a former boxing gym in Bronzeville. The City of Milwaukee sold him the building for a dollar. He called it America’s Black Holocaust Museum.

“It was always kind of controversial … the use of the word holocaust,” said Eugene Kane, a former Journal Sentinel columnist, who met Cameron years before he opened the museum. Some argued that the term should be reserved for the extermination of European Jews and others by the Nazis during World War II, Kane said.

But, Kane added, Cameron was a deeply spiritual man who believed that confronting the scale of the horror was a prerequisite to healing, to racial reconciliation.

Early displays were humble, handmade by Cameron himself from news clippings and photographs on poster board. Later, in the 1990s, funds were raised for improvements, staff and important traveling shows, including "A Slave Ship Speaks: The Wreck of the Henrietta Marie" in 1999.

Throughout the years, in its larger narrative about African American history from pre-captivity to the present, the museum was always unusual for its emphasis on racist violence and the widespread complicity of white Americans that made it possible, Jackson and others said.

“There are hundreds of African-American museums around the country, and lots of them have told bits and pieces of these stories,” said Jackson. “Up until recently, outside of our museum and maybe a couple others, there was still a great deal of reluctance to tell the stories of lynchings.”

A misunderstood photograph

One of the primary object lessons in the museum was a reproduction of the photograph taken that night in Marion, which was distributed for years afterward as a souvenir. In it, a man with a Hitler-esque mustache looks directly at the camera and points to the dead men. Others smile and smoke cigarettes.

The image has often been assumed to be that of a Southern lynching, used in films such as “Mississippi Burning,” for instance. It inspired Billie Holiday’s requiem “Strange Fruit” with its lyrics about “black bodies swinging in the southern breeze.”

It became a way to talk about the national scale of racial violence, including in the North. The museum told the history of “sundown towns,” prevalent in the North, where African-Americans were not welcome after dark, for instance, and the northern strongholds of the Ku Klux Klan.

The museum also became a repository for lynching stories and sometimes attracted visitors who had personal or family stories to share. Often families were torn apart by these killings, said Jackson, who has been involved with the museum, including its online presence and community activities, since 2002.

“One of the things that Dr. Cameron wanted to do was to humanize the people who were the victims, to let you know that they were human beings that lost their lives,” said Jackson. “So we would try to investigate and find out the backstories."

Though Cameron's story became more widely known later in his life, when he was interviewed by Oprah and the BBC, the museum often struggled financially, several sources said. It had an important patron in Martin F. Stein, who not only gave to the museum but cajoled other philanthropists to do so as well.

Photos: Looking back at history of America's Black Holocaust Museum

After Cameron and Stein died, though, the economic downturn that soon followed hit the museum hard financially. 

"I can remember it like it happened yesterday … it was very sad for me," said Jackson, who, as head of the board then, held a press conference in 2008 to announce the museum's closure. Jackson felt as if he'd broken a promise he'd made to Cameron in his final days to continue the work.

Since then Jackson, Brad Pruitt, who is now the interim executive of the museum, and longtime social justice advocate Fran Kaplan have never stopped working to get the museum back on its feet. 

"You had these three people, these worker bees," who never gave up and gave hundreds of hours of volunteer time over the course of a decade, said Tyanna McLaurin, chairwoman of the board of the Dr. James Cameron Legacy Foundation, a nonprofit founded in recent years to run the new museum. 

Emphasizing the history of segregation

One of the objects that's been in storage for a decade and that will be included in the new space is a re-created slave ship, which people in the community described as a touchstone, Pruitt said. Cameron's story will remain at the heart of the museum and there will be renewed emphasis on the history of segregation, including exhibits related to Milwaukee's housing marches, Pruitt said.

The space and exhibits are being designed and produced by local architects Engberg Anderson and Flux Design. The group collaborated with graduate students in the Museum Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, as well as other consultants and community groups, to develop an exhibition strategy.

The museum is expected to open in fall, perhaps October, said McLaurin. The museum will lease space in a new building called The Griot on the site of the old museum at N. 4th St. and W. North Ave.  

Many of the people involved had personal ties to Cameron, including his son Virgil Cameron, who is also on the board; community activist Reuben Harpole; Pruitt and others. 

How things unfold from here, and the quality of the museum's exhibits. may depend on what the group can afford. The board is trying to raise $3 million for the build-out of the museum and an additional $4 million for an endowment, which would give the organization financial stability over time, a common best practice for museums. 

So far, they've raised a little less than $1 million, said McLaurin, who said the group is reassessing how much the museum will need to operate annually. 

"The museum never really had a tremendous amount of support from the community," said Jackson. "You know people talk about it now like it was a treasure … but you can't run a museum without money." 

There has been support for other cultural institutions in Milwaukee, Coggs said, adding that similar support should be extended to America's Black Holocaust Museum, including governmental support.

"The museum is reopening at a wonderful time in this nation’s history when the climate of politics and social justice is just right now," added Coggs. 

Stevenson talked about the difficulty of the undertaking more broadly: "I do think it's difficult getting this nation to address a history as painful and tragic as the racial terrorism that lynching represents. ... (Cameron) and the holocaust museum have built a foundation on which many of us can do important new work." 

Or, as Obama put it that day on the National Mall: "It is in this embrace of truth as best as we can know it, in celebration of the entire American experience, where real patriotism lies."

IF YOU GO

A celebration will be held Monday and Tuesday to mark the re-emergence of America's Black Holocaust Museum and the grand opening of The Griot development.

At 10 a.m. Monday, actor and social activist Danny Glover will appear in conversations with Melissa Goins, president of Maures Development. Virgil Cameron, James Cameron's son, will also speak. Admission is free. 

The Tuesday program, beginning at 6 p.m., features artists and performers Sonia Sanchez, Aja Monet and Elijah Blake, music by the Eddie Butts Band and food from local black-owned businesses. Tickets are $25. Premium tickets are $250. Visit celebrategriot-abhm.eventbrite.com.