James Cameron, 92, Founder of Museum, Is Dead

MILWAUKEE, June 14 (AP) — James Cameron, who survived an attempted lynching by a white mob and went on to found America's Black Holocaust Museum, died here on Sunday. He was 92.

In 1930, in Marion, Ind., Mr. Cameron, then 16, and two friends were arrested and accused of killing a white man during a robbery and raping the man's companion. A mob broke them out of the local jail and hanged Mr. Cameron's two friends, then placed a rope around his neck.

"They began to chant for me like a football player, 'We want Cameron, we want Cameron,' " he said in a 2003 interview. "I could feel the blood in my body just freezing up."

He was spared when a man in the crowd proclaimed his innocence.

He was convicted of being an accessory before the fact to voluntary manslaughter and spent four years in prison, but was granted a pardon in 1993. He said he had been beaten into signing a false confession.

In 1988, he opened the museum in a small storefront room in downtown Milwaukee. Six years later, he took over an abandoned 12,000-square-foot gymnasium that the city sold him for $1. The museum explores the history of the struggles of blacks in America from slavery to modern times and is considered one of the first of its kind in the country.

Ms. Weaver said Mr. Cameron counted one of his defining moments last June when the Senate issued an apology for not standing against the lynching violence that from 1882 to 1968 killed more than 4,700 people, three-fourths of them black.

"I was saved by a miracle," Mr. Cameron said at the time. "They were going to lynch me between my two buddies," he said, with thousands of people "hollering for my blood, when a voice said, 'Take this boy back.' "

Mr. Cameron is survived by his wife, Virginia, and three of their children.