Ku Klux Klan

Myrlie Evers Williams

Bill Thompson
Photo by John Mathew Smith

Today, June 12, is a somber anniversary. It was 60 years ago tonight that a white supremacist and Ku Klux Klan leader gun down a civil rights leader named Medgar Evers as he arrived home.

His killer remained at large for years to come. And Evers’s death was just the first of three high profile assassinations that decade, including Malcolm x and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

His widow was Myrlie Evers. Years later she remarried and has been known since as Myrlie Evers Williams.

But she was always a strong woman.

I met her in 1999 when she wrote a book about her lifetime of triumph over tragedy, a book called Watch Me Fly.

So here now, from 1999, Myrlie Evers Williams.

Myrlie Evers Williams is 90 now, and still an active civil rights activist andleader.

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James Cameron

Bill Thompson

WARNING: What you’re abiyt ti gear is a true story, told by the suvivor of a violent and horrisying attack. You need to know that some of the descriptions are graphic, some of the words used are offensive.

James Cameron was born in 1914 in LaCrosse, Wisconsin. When he was a child, his family moved to Marion, Indiana.

It was there, in the summer of 1930, that James Cameron survived a lynching attempt.

He was a suspect in a robbery-and-murder case in Marion, Indiana along with two older teenagers. Both of them were lynched, and died. Cameron was to be the third victim of the Ku Klux Klan-led mob.

They tied a noose around Cameron’s neck, and death appeared imminent. But just as he was about to be hanged, a mysterious female voice was heard, saying Cameron was innocent.

A star local football player then stepped up, removed the noose and saved Cameron.

He did do prison time, but lived to tell about it.

I met him in the spring of 1994, when he wrote a book about his near-lynching.

So here now, from 1994, James Cameron.

In later years, Cameron became a civil rights activist and founded three chapters of the NAACP in Indiana.

James Cameron died in 2006. He was 92.