Dragging Thomas Shipp out into the balmy night, punching and kicking him, the mob strung him up by the neck from the bars of a jail window. They took Abe next, pulling him across the street to the looming courthouse through a gauntlet of fists, boot heels, and bats. They shoved his head through a noose and hoisted his body from a maple tree. Abe wrested his hands free and pulled up on the rope that was strangling him, to catch his breath.
From his cell, James watched in horror as the mob let Abe down from the tree long enough to break both his arms with bats and then pull him back up by his neck. When Abe was dead, a group retrieved Thomas’s body from the jailhouse window and strung him up next to Abe from the maple tree. A studio photographer was called to capture the moment. The photographer took his time setting up the shot, angling the floodlights on the tree to illuminate the bodies properly in the gathering darkness.
James thought about the crime he had been involved in perpetrating. He wondered what would have happened if he had turned in Abe and Thomas peacefully when he had the chance. Maybe he should have stood up to them instead of running away. Now three people were dead, and the mob was coming back for more. Maybe this was his fault, he thought for a moment. Maybe he deserved to die.
Then the crowd came for James. Beating him into surrender until blood ran down his face, washed away only by his tears, the mob hauled him into the town square. Someone smacked his head with the end of a pick. Fists, rocks, and spit pummeled him. He recognized faces in the rabble, people he knew, people he liked, people who he thought were fond of him. James was no longer a human being to them, but a nameless proxy, an emblem that would come to instill fear into a subjugated black community. At the courthouse maple tree, a loop of rope as thick as his thumb was fastened under James’s jaw. He looked out into a pitiless crowd. As the noose tightened around his neck, he heard something strange.
A lone voice, soft and indecipherable at first, pacified the crowd. Within moments, the rope went slack and a hush came over the mob.
Of the many archived newspaper reports of the famous Marion lynching of August 7, 1930, none provides any reason for the mob’s letting James go. In the years that followed, some speculated it was the sheriff who talked some reason into the hangmen. Others suggested that the mob took pity on James because he looked so young and was lighter-skinned than Thomas or Abe. The voice that said, “Take this boy back. He had nothing to do with any raping or killing,” might have belonged to one of Deeter’s family members, pleading to end the bloodshed. Or perhaps the mob’s adrenaline had simply waned.
But until the great civil rights activist Dr. James Cameron, a supersurvivor who went on to shape history for the better, died in 2006 at the age of ninety-two, he would swear it was the voice of God that pacified the crowd and saved him that night.
Some may question whether James Cameron should be considered a supersurvivor. After all, he wasn’t a totally innocent person, though he never claimed he was. He was flawed, and he played a role in wrongdoings that culminated in the death of a good man at the bloody hands of people James probably shouldn’t have considered “friends.” But nothing about supersurvival requires that a person’s past be morally spotless. Unlike with many survivors in this book, James’s trauma resulted from a chain of events set in motion partially by his own actions. But if it were necessary to be a saint to be a supersurvivor, virtually no one would have a chance. As we’ve seen time and time again, however, trauma can sometimes turn lives around. For James, that night in 1930 began a journey, one guided by his conviction that God had saved him.
Nobody will ever truly know, of course, if the hand of God was at work. Philosophers and theologians have debated the existence and nature of God for millennia. René Descartes and Thomas Aquinas thought they could prove that God existed; Bertrand Russell and Richard Dawkins were pretty sure they could disprove this—or at least cast considerable doubt on it. The debate rages on, with no end in sight.
Fortunately, it isn’t necessary to know whether the divine exists to investigate the effects of faith. In his perhaps most controversial work, The Future of an Illusion, infamous critic of religion Sigmund Freud writes about his approach to religious beliefs: “Of the reality of most of them we cannot judge; just as they cannot be proved, neither can they be refuted.” Yet Freud nonetheless studied closely what he believed were the ill effects of believing in a god.
But Freud’s methods were crude, consisting primarily of in-depth case studies, often of himself or his emotionally troubled patients. Though respected by some, his work is hardly considered conclusive by today’s scientific standards. Since 1927, when The Future of an Illusion was published, social scientists have birthed countless studies trying to answer the question “What good is faith?”
Many have famously shown benefits of aspects of faith. Most significant in its scope is the research, spearheaded by David Snowdon, that has come to be known as the Nun Study. As an epidemiologist and professor of neurology at the University of Kentucky, Snowdon was initially interested in what factors would increase or decrease the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. More than twenty-five years and fifty published research articles later, the study ended up being so much more. His research team followed about seven hundred American Catholic nuns of the School Sisters of Notre Dame as they aged. Examining them annually, the team collected information on cognitive and physical functioning, medical diseases, genetics, and nutrition. Detailed records kept by the sisters on virtually every stage of their lives also meant that researchers could determine earlier risk and protective factors with a great degree of accuracy.
The most trumpeted finding of the study was a simple one: happier nuns live longer. In 1930, when the nuns were only about twenty-two years old on average, the Mother Superior asked each of them to write an autobiography. By the late 1990s, about a hundred and eighty of these narratives were still in existence. Snowdon, along with researchers Deborah Danner and Wallace Friesen, identified passages in the narratives that referred to emotions, and he counted up the number of positive, negative, and neutral ones.
The number of positive emotions referred to in those early autobiographies actually predicted risk of death six decades later. Perhaps even more astounding, however, was that, as a group, the nuns lived longer than everyone else. In a study published in The Journals of Gerontology, Steven Butler and David Snowdon tracked down the records of twenty-five hundred School Sisters of Notre Dame who were born between 1886 and 1916. The researchers were interested in how many of the nuns would pass away between 1965 to 1989 compared to the general population of American women with similar characteristics (e.g., age and race). About a thousand sisters died during that period, making them only 73 percent as likely to have died as a similarly aged American woman during the same years. In fact, according to some statistics, the average life span for a Roman Catholic nun is about eight years longer than that of other American women. This isn’t a new insight. In 1959 an article appearing in Time magazine titled “Long-Lived Nuns” cited research by University of Dayton sociologist Con Fetcher documenting a higher-than-average longevity for sisters.
But even now the causes of this life span advantage aren’t clearly understood. Were researchers seeing the tangible benefits of having faith? “It remains a mystery to me how [so many of] these women have lived a century or longer,” Snowdon writes in his 2001 book, Aging with Grace. “But as I learned the details of their pasts, as we gathered information about their mental and physical capabilities, as I came to know them as individuals, and as we analyzed their genes and their brains . . . clues to their longevity have begun to emerge.
“Two of these factors cannot be scientifically tested by the Nun Study data,” Snowdon admits. “And yet after fifteen years of working with the sisters, I believe strongly in their importance. The first is the deep spirituality these women share. . . . The power of community is the second factor.” There could be other factors—the sisters’ high level of education, good medical care, high-qu
ality diet, low level of smoking and alcohol consumption, and perhaps even low job stress. This is often the case when studying the physical and psychological health effects of religion—it’s almost impossible to tease apart faith from other, more tangible trappings of a spiritual life.
What is clear, at least, is that something about religion can be beneficial to believers. And it’s not just about nuns. Dozens of studies have now documented the benefits for laypeople of religion and spirituality in coping with a variety of life stressors, including cancer, heart failure, kidney failure, depression, obesity, serious mental illness, and even the daily hassles of ordinary life.
It’s important to mention that nobody is scientifically claiming that being nonreligious is a detriment to one’s mental or physical health. However, having a genuine sense of faith appears, in many cases, to be a very good thing. It may even save lives, or at least prolong them a few years, as it did for the School Sisters of Notre Dame. As for James Cameron, while we can debate the likelihood of a true divine intervention saving him from a bloodthirsty lynch mob, his newfound faith would give his life meaning and a new direction that ultimately would make the world a better place.
In the city of Anderson, Indiana, James Cameron, now a young man in his early twenties, waited in a small community room filled with empty folding chairs. He wondered if anyone would show up tonight, or if cowardice would once again win the day. The Marion lynching, and the crime in which he had been involved, had shattered everything he thought he knew about life. He had spent a year in jail waiting to go to trial and four long years in prison reconstructing his faith and even figuring out what faith meant now. Whether it was because of God or the sympathies of a seemingly merciless mob, he’d faced certain death and had miraculously, mysteriously survived. For James, exactly how he had survived didn’t matter so much as why.
The reason became increasingly simple to him. He felt that God had a mission for him: to turn his suffering, guilt, and anger into something precious—a way of making the world a better place. Perhaps just as mysterious as his survival, James emerged from his experience with a renewed sense of ever-deepening faith.
Personal and historical accounts credit his conversion to Catholicism to a surprising source. As soon as the lynch mob released him, a police cruiser escorted him out of Marion to nearby Anderson for protection. “The sheriff there, he was an important player in this story,” says civil rights activist and Cameron scholar Fran Kaplan. “This sheriff’s name was Bernard Bradley. He was a kind person. He cared for this boy. The sheriff was a devout Catholic, so he couldn’t have been part of the Ku Klux Klan.” As James was recovering from his severe beating at the hands of the mob, Sherriff Bradley allowed him to be a trustee of the jail, which meant he could come and go as he wanted while he awaited trial. He even babysat the sheriff’s young children. Even after an all-white jury convicted James in 1931 as an accessory before the fact in the murder of Claude Deeter, he and Sheriff Bradley remained close. Bradley died of cancer quite young, but James never forgot his kindness.
Such kindness contrasted starkly with the cruelty that divided America’s races. While James went to prison for his part in the crime, the men responsible for the murders of Thomas Shipp and Abe Smith were never brought to justice. Nobody has ever claimed that the two boys were innocent of their crimes, but that didn’t give an angry mob the right to execute them without a trial. America was filled with racial prejudice, typified by the lynching of men and boys, but perpetrated on a daily basis in ways far more common and insidious. “I realized I had reached and passed beyond the crisis between light and darkness, between good and evil,” James wrote in his autobiography, A Time of Terror. His near-death experience and the moment of seeming-divine intervention galvanized his faith and propelled him to act. “I was thankful to God for everything—the trees, the grass, the flowers, the birds of the air, the beasts of the fields, for my worn and torn body, and a sick mind made whole again.” James continued: “With faith and prayer over my lips forever, I was determined to keep my hands on the throttle and my eyes upon the rails. . . . I was now a young man, twenty-one years of age, who had time to pick up the loose ends of his life and weave them into something beautiful, worthwhile, and God-like.”
He would begin planting the seeds of change by inviting others to join him in creating Anderson’s first NAACP chapter. Now he stood in that empty room full of folding chairs, waiting patiently as the hour of the first chapter meeting came and went. “People were afraid to join,” Kaplan says. “The perception was that if anyone were to be caught joining the organization, they’d lose their jobs, or worse.” But after a while, the first brave people came through the door and filled the folding chairs. James smiled and welcomed them. These early seeds blossomed, and over the next decade, he founded new branches in Muncie and South Bend—and went on to become one of the most promising leaders in the burgeoning civil rights movement of the 1950s.
But it made him a target.
“He wasn’t afraid for himself, but he was for his family. He was getting death threats all the time,” explains his son, Virgil Cameron. “We were going to move to Canada, but we stopped in Milwaukee on the way, and that’s where he decided we’d stay.” Milwaukee was a thriving industrial manufacturing town and a perfect place for the Cameron family to settle. For starters, James was able to get a good job at a box factory. Milwaukee also hosted a substantial black community that had come in the Great Migration of millions of African Americans out of the rural South in the early twentieth century. Nationally, the civil rights movement was progressing. By 1955, black leadership was adopting the principles of civil disobedience, and Milwaukee was about to become a big player. For every national demonstration James joined—such as the March on Washington at which Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech—he was also on the local frontlines, participating in demonstrations to desegregate urban housing.
Centralizing and binding the fragmented ideologies of the movement were the black churches, including the Catholic church James and his family belonged to. “The emergence of indigenous black institutions in response to societal and governmental repression is perhaps the crowning achievement of black culture. The black church, originally meant to rein in black resistance, became the foundation upon which it was built,” writes Lawrence Levine in his book Black Culture and Black Consciousness. Inspired by this faith-based movement perpetuated by minister-activists such as the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., who was leading fair housing marches in Chicago, James joined in landmark demonstrations in support of an open housing bill. After two hundred consecutive days of protest, he, along with thousands of Milwaukee residents, forced the city to desegregate neighborhoods, allowing African Americans the right to own houses anywhere in Milwaukee. In fact, the first federal open housing law was modeled on the one made in Milwaukee.
Virgil Cameron sometimes wonders what kept his father going. No matter what legislation was enacted, there remained the ever-present bigotry no laws could expunge. His father obviously was driven by a strong desire for justice and equal rights. But this was only part of the story. Virgil also says that his father was trying to redeem himself in the eyes of God for the role he had played in the deaths of Claude Deeter, Abe Smith, and Thomas Shipp.
Some may find it counterintuitive that religion was such a motivating factor in James’s personal journey toward supersurvival and in the fight for civil rights more broadly. To be sure, it would have been easy for him and other civil rights leaders to conclude that God had it out for them, was indifferent to their plight, or simply didn’t exist. After all, wasn’t this unjust world ultimately God’s creation? As we will see, not every religious believer who encounters trauma holds as steadfastly to faith as James did. Yet for him and his compatriots, every subsequent church bombing, lynching, and hate crime brought about something extraordinary: the power of faith transformed the pain into genuine hope for change. Faith seemed to help people cope and t
o strive for better days, even when logic dictated the opposite. Faith filled them with the courage to look the reality of racial prejudice in the face without flinching and ask the question “What now?” This courage, combined with the confidence in their personal abilities to make a difference, is what we define in chapters 2 and 3 as grounded hope.
Faith is good—at least it was for James. But we’ve all heard of people consumed with religion in an unhealthy way—with a faith that torments them, fills them with guilt, or turns them against their friends. This begs a second question: is faith always good?
In 1959, as the United States experienced widespread civil rights reform, an eleven-year-old named Michael Bussee rode his bicycle to the public library in Riverside, California, in a desperate search for a different kind of change. Recently, his fifth-grade classmates had registered that something was different about Michael and were hurling a terrible-sounding word at him. He didn’t know what it meant, but he knew it was something bad. He paused at an index card in the library’s card catalog that directed him to books on homosexuality, all of which were shelved under the topic “Abnormal Psychology.” Oh God, he thought, it’s a real thing. This word finally explained why he had been developing crushes on other schoolboys.
For Michael, this was a pivotal moment. The beliefs he had been raised with told him that his attractions were wrong, that he suffered from an illness, and that, according to the strictest interpretation of the Bible, homosexuality was a sinful perversion. Homosexuality was not exactly talked about in his church, but even at his young age, Michael had developed an appreciation for its spiritual consequences. If he didn’t figure out some way to overcome it, Michael told himself, the Bible laid out the consequences. “First Corinthians, chapter six, verses nine through eleven,” recites Michael. “ ‘Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men will inherit the kingdom of God.’ ”
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