A Time of Terror. A Survivor.s Story 12+

📕 “I had done nothing that could really be called bad. I had been foolish, yes, but I had not done anything bad. The trouble was, this was Marion, Indiana, where there was very little room for foolish black boys.”On a sweltering August night in 1930, two older boys invited sixteen-year-old Jimmie Cameron for what they said would be a joyride. Instead, they held up a young white couple parked in a remote Lover’s Lane. The stickup went horribly wrong. The boys were arrested, dragged from jail by a mob, and lynched on the courthouse lawn before thousands of spectators. Miraculously, Cameron lived to tell the story.He began writing his account while still a teenager, traumatized by the lynching and confined in a maximum-security adult prison. A talented storyteller, Cameron shows us the humor and horror of coming of age as a black child during the Jim Crow era. Populated by unforgettable characters both kind and cruel, A Time of Terror is a poignant story of anger and courage, forgiveness and redemption.The memoir ends when Cameron leaves prison at age twenty-one, vowing to “pick up the loose ends of my life and weave them into something beautiful, worthwhile, and God-like.” The book’s Afterword by his protégé Reggie Jackson describes what Cameron accomplished in his next seventy-one years as a civil rights pioneer, working man, self-taught historian, writer, father of five, and founder of America’s Black Holocaust Museum.The 3rd edition includes never-before-published chapters. It...