[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 39 (Thursday, March 3, 2022)]
[Senate]
[Page S988]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     REMEMBERING DR. JAMES CAMERON

  Ms. BALDWIN. Mr. President, I rise today to honor the life and legacy 
of Dr. James Cameron on what would have been his 108th birthday. James 
Cameron was born in La Crosse, WI, on February 25, 1914. A civil rights 
pioneer, Dr. Cameron fought his entire life to create an accountable 
and equitable world. Dr. Cameron left an indelible mark on our country 
as the only known person in the United States to survive a lynching, an 
event in 1930 at the age of 16 which would inevitably change his life.
  Dr. Cameron was an early activist for the Civil Rights movement, 
desegregating the movie theater in the Indiana town where he and his 
wife, Virginia, lived. He worked with the NAACP, founding branches in 
Madison, WI, as well as Muncie and South Bend, IN. He also served as 
Indiana's director of civil liberties.
  In 1952, the Cameron family came to Milwaukee. Over the years, he 
acquired pieces like Ku Klux Klan robes, as well as a piece of rope 
that had been used during his own lynching. After visiting Yad Vashem, 
the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel, he set out to create 
a museum with these pieces to educate the public about the injustices 
Black people faced in America. At age 74, he founded America's Black 
Holocaust Museum in the historic Bronzeville neighborhood of Milwaukee. 
Three years later, in 1991, Indiana Governor Evan Bayh gave him the key 
to the city of Marion where he had miraculously survived the lynching 
61 years prior.
  Dr. Cameron so rightly believed that only by sharing the hard truths 
about our Nation's history, could we move forward together to promote 
racial repair, reconciliation, and healing. The best word to describe 
Dr. Cameron was ``survivor'' and his life's work and legacy will now 
live on with the Grand Reemergence of America's Black Holocaust Museum 
in Milwaukee on February 25, 2022. With a mission to build public 
awareness of the harmful legacies of slavery, lynching, and Jim Crow, 
America's Black Holocaust Museum is guided by a vision of a society 
that remembers its past in order to shape a better future, a nation 
undivided by race where every person matters equally. This will be a 
home for others to take the lesson that, in order to create an 
equitable world, we must first create a world willing to grow.

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