Strange Fruit: Voices of a Lynching

On August 6, 1930, two African-American teenagers, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, were arrested and charged with the armed robbery and murder of a white factory worker, Claude Deeter, and the rape of his companion, Mary Ball, in Marion, Indiana.

That evening, a mob of thousands broke into the jail with sledgehammers and crowbars to pull the young men out of their cells. The accused duo was lynched in the town center.

Local photographer Lawrence Beitler captured the incident, in what would become the most iconic photograph of lynching in America. The widely-circulated photograph shows two bodies hanging from a tree, surrounded by a crowd of onlookers. It helped inspire the poem and song "Strange Fruit," written by Abel Meeropol — and performed around the world by Billie Holiday.

But a secret, missing from the photograph, is that Shipp and Smith weren't the only Black boys that were supposed to die that day — a third boy was also supposed to be lynched. James Cameron is believed to be the only African-American to survive a lynching. This is his story.