Amid a screaming crowd at a Ku Klux Klan rally Saturday in Elkhorn, Wis., an 81-year-old African-American man with white hair and a distinguished brown suit stood silently.
A young Klansman in a black shirt and wrap-around sunglasses bellowed into a microphone about the “discrimination” that whites suffer at the hands of blacks.
Dozens in the crowd outside the Walworth County Courthouse roared their approval, flashing stiff-armed Nazi salutes. Several counterprotesters tried to shout the speaker down, raising their middle fingers to mock the Nazi gesture.
But the elderly gentleman remained calm, taking it all in, studying the faces of the 16 black-shirted men on the steps of the courthouse as if he were an investigator studying a crime he had seen before.
“Things haven’t changed a bit,” he reflected sadly. “Just watching this brings the memories back as fresh as the day it happened.”
The observer was James Cameron, founder of America’s Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, and the “it” he referred to was a Klan lynching that he survived 65 years earlier but that killed two of his friends.
That deadly rally in August 1930-which Cameron miraculously survived when someone lifted the noose from around his neck-was in a different era outside a different courthouse, that one in Marion, Ind.
But Cameron, a nationally known historian of Klan violence, and others who watched rallies in Elkhorn and far northwest suburban Woodstock on Saturday observed how disturbingly similar the 1990s could look to the Jim Crow 1930s, at least for a few hours.
Besides the 16 Klansmen, about 50 Klan sympathizers, 100 counterprotesters, at least 100 police in riot gear and hundreds of onlookers attended the Elkhorn rally.
There were a few scuffles, but police arrested only two people on suspicion of disorderly conduct, and no injuries were reported, police said.
An earlier rally at the McHenry County Courthouse in Woodstock was a bit more raucous, with at least several scuffles, one fistfight, seven people arrested and one person treated and released for a minor back injury from Memorial Medical Center in Woodstock, authorities said.
There were more than 200 police officers at that rally, and teams of baton-holding officers had to intervene several times in fights between Klan sympathizers and counterprotesters.
Immediately after the Klan rally, a coalition of McHenry County churches held a prayer service on the Woodstock Square celebrating diversity.
But Cameron has his own way of combating the Klan’s message. In November, he found a permanent home in Milwaukee for his Black Holocaust Museum.
It includes a photograph of Cameron’s two friends, Thomas Shipp, 18, and Abram Smith, 19, hanging from a tree outside the Marion courthouse as a group of whites look on with indifference and humor.
All three of them had been charged in connection with a shooting death, but were dragged out of their jail cells before they could stand trial.
Although Cameron slipped from his noose, he was convicted as an accomplice to manslaughter and imprisoned.
The State of Indiana pardoned him for the conviction in February 1993.
The details of the 1930 courthouse scene in Indiana were relevant to Cameron as he stood outside the Wisconsin courthouse Saturday.
“They still think it’s a white man’s country,” he said, “but it’s not now, and it has never been. It’s everyman’s country, and it’s amazing to see how much ignorance they have of the history of their own country,” he said.
