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pounding away at the masonry around the prison’s iron door. When the first barricade gave way, the mob found the interior doors unlocked, and began the assault. Shipp and Smith were brutally beaten, then dragged to the tree where their bodies were hung. Shipp was by all accounts already dead from the assault when the rope was placed around his neck. Lawrence Beitler was summoned to take a picture marking the day when the residents of Grant County ensured that there’d be no trial for the accused; no chance they’d ever be set free. The acting head of the NAACP, Walter White, investigated the lynchings, and found the Sheriff and his men either incompetent or criminally negligent. Amid rumors that a group of blacks were planning to march into Marion and seek retribution, Grant County Prosecutor Harley Hardin determined he wouldn’t prosecute, claiming his actions would only incite more violence. None of the members of the mob who lynched Shipp and Smith ever served time, although indictments were brought by Indiana Attorney General James Ogden. Whites in Marion, enraged by the indictments, no doubt swayed the jury in the trial of two of the alleged vigilantes, and after the first acquittals, the remaining indictments were dropped. Mary Ball eventually admitted that she hadn’t been raped. Speculation remains that she may have, at one time, dated Smith or Shipp. Billie Holiday’s 1939 recording of the song “Many people are totally unaware “Strange Fruit” and the of the whole narrative [of] these manner in which she performed it live helped lynchings in Marion.” cement the terrible event in the American — MATTHEW MYER BOULTON, CTS PRESIDENT consciousness; additionally, photographic souvenirs of lynchings did as much to inspire civil rights activists of the members of the state legislature as they did to instill terror. were dues-paying Klansmen. The CTS program that honors the legAs crowds began to gather around acy of Holiday’s song is part of an obserMarion’s town square, Sheriff Campbell vance of the Christian faith’s Holy Week, ordered his men to keep their weapons holstered — the mob included women the days leading up to Easter Sunday. In and kids. The throng grew rapidly as news addition to the film — and an open disof the killing and the rape spread, and cussion about the events that inspired onlookers streamed into Marion from the song and the video — the program surrounding towns. By nightfall, somewill include vocalist Keirsten Hodgens where between 10 and 15,000 Hoosiers (Ball State University); dancer Mariel stood outside the Grant County jail, howl- Greenlee (Dance Kaleidoscope); celing for the blood of the three black teenlist Eric Edberg (DePauw University); agers inside. (Marion’s total population in pianist R. Kent Cook (Illinois Wesleyan 1930 stood at about 23,000.) University); and, oboist Roger Roe Whether Campbell was complicit in the (Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra & murders is unclear, but the crowd that Indiana University). The filmmaker had gathered clearly outnumbered law who worked with Frank Thomas, enforcement officials that night. Using Elizabeth Myer of the Salt Project, will sledgehammers, several men began also be in attendance. n Of the estimated 4,479 lynchings that occurred in the United States between 1882 and 1968 — a count taken by the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama — the Marion mob scene, preserved in a heartbreaking photograph and an equally moving song, may be the most famous example of a vigilante murder. The two men who were killed that August night in1930 in Marion were teenagers: Thomas Shipp was 18 and Abram Smith was 19. James Cameron, then 16, was spared by the mob after someone in the crowd shouted that Cameron was innocent of any crime. The three suspects had been jailed after being accused of the rape of a white woman, Mary Ball, and the shooting death of a white man, Claude Deeter. After Deeter perished from his wounds, Grant County Sheriff Jake Campbell took Deeter’s bloody shirt and hung it in the window of the county courthouse. The town was already on edge: a series of union-busting bombings had gone unsolved, and many Marion residents were familiar with newspaper statistics about the high rate of dismissals in Grant County. Over 60 percent of those tried for crime in and around Marion got off, and the public perceived local cops and detectives as completely inept. Additionally, the entire state had been consumed by the rise of Ku Klux Klan activity, influence and control in the decade prior — in the ‘20s, over half
NUVO // 100% RECYCLED PAPER // 04.09.14 - 04.16.14 // NEWS 9