Thomas Shipp

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Thomas Shipp was an African-American who was lynched on August 7, 1930 in Marion, Indiana along with Abram Smith. They had been arrested the night before, charged with robbing and murdering a white factory worker and raping his girlfriend. A large crowd broke into the jail with sledgehammers, beat the two men, and hanged them. Police officers in the crowd cooperated in the lynching. A third man, 16 year old James Cameron, narrowly escaped lynching thanks to an unidentified participant who announced that he had nothing to do with the rape or murder.^[1] A studio photographer, Lawrence Beitler, took a photograph of the dead bodies hanging from a tree surrounded by a large crowd; thousands of copies of the photograph were sold.^[2]

The Ku Klux Klan was active in the area.^[3]

Cameron has stated in interviews that Shipp and Smith had in fact started to rob a white man, who was later found shot. He says that he fled when he realized what was going on.^[4] The police accused all three men of murder and rape.^[5]

Cameron later became (in 1988) the founder and director of America's Black Holocaust Museum, a museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin dedicated to the history of lynching in the United States ^[6].

In 1937 Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher from New York, saw a copy of this photograph. Meeropol later said that the photograph "haunted me for days" and inspired the writing of the poem, Strange Fruit. It was published in the New York Teacher and later in the magazine New Masses, in both cases under the pseudonym Lewis Allan.^[7] This poem became the text for the song of the same name, performed and popularized by Billie Holiday.^[8] The song reached 16th place on the charts in July 1939.

[edit] Further reading

• An American Dilemma by Gunnar Myrdal (Harper and Brothers, 1944);
• A Time of Terror: A Survivor’s Story by James Cameron (Black Holocaust Museum) (Black Classics Press, 1982). This book has an account of this lynching, by the man who escaped.
• Lynching in the Heartland by James Madison (St. Martin’s Press, 2000) ISBN 0-312-23902-5.
• Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America by James Allen, Hilton Als, et al. (Twin Palms Publishers, 2000). Book corresponding to web site cited below.
• The God Moment by Alan D. Wright

[edit] External links

• Lynchings in America review by Melvin Sylvester
• Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America
• Notes on the photo from Without Sanctuary, includes a quote from A Time of Terror
• Lynching in the USA, includes an account of the origin of Strange Fruit
• Lynchings & Hangings in American History
• A 2001 interview with James Cameron at Indiana University, published by IDS news
• A 2005 interview with James Cameron, the survivor (from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel July 8, 2005.) (link may require free registration)
• Review of A Lynching in the Heartland reviewed by Monroe H. Little (Department of History, Indiana University), review published on H-net

[edit] Notes

1. ↑  The primary source for these events is A Time of Terror, which is an eyewitness account. Relevant passages are quoted in several of the external links, including photo notes from Without Sanctuary and Legands of America. Other accounts are in Lynching in the Heartland, listed in the Further reading section, above.
2. ↑  "Lawrence Beitler, a studio photographer, took this photo. For ten days and nights he printed thousands of copies, which sold for fifty cents apiece." from A Time of Terror, quoted in Legands of America, see previous note. See also Lynching in the Heartland, chapter 6 which discusses the photograph in detail.
3. ↑  According to the account in A Time of Terror. This is disputed by Madison, in Lynching in the Heartland (on pp 41-42), but supported by the notes to photo 32 in Without Sanctuary. Madison's position is also disputed by the Monroe H Little review of the Madison book. Cynthia Carr, author of Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America discovered ads for local klan gatherings in Marion newspapers from 1930 during her research for the book, and interviewed subjects that believed the klan was still active at the time of the lynching.
4. ↑  in the 2001 Indian university Oral History statement, reported by IDS news at this link
5. ↑  in the 2001 Indian university Oral History statement by Cameron. This is also mentioned in pretty much all other accounts of the incident.
6. ↑  The museum's founding date is given in the AP interview/article by Sharon Cohen, which appeared in the Standard-Times on February 17, 2003, and is quoted in the IDS interview, see above. Cameron's position as Founder and Director is also mentioned in the Little review cited earlier and in other sources.
7. ↑  According to the spartacus.schoolnet article and this PBS site.
8. ↑  Holiday's autobiography credits her with co-authoring the song, but this PBS site credits the music as well as the words to Meeropol.