Milwaukee Public Library Hosts ABHM Book Club

Join the Milwaukee Public Library and America’s Black Holocaust Museum (ABHM) as we partner to discuss Dr. James Cameron’s 1982 memoir, A Time of Terror, and showcase a collection of Dr. Cameron’s self-published writings. Visit https://www.abhmuseum.org/book-club-discussion-guides/ for more information about the ABHM Book Club series, and mpl.org/special_collections/images/dr-james-cameron-pamphlet-collection for more information about the Dr. James Cameron Pamphlet Collection.

Dr. James Cameron (1914-2006) was an early civil rights pioneer, self-taught public historian, and author of dozens of essays on issues in American and African American history and contemporary life. Cameron’s most well known written work is his memoir, A Time of Terror: A Survivor’s Story, now in its 3rd edition. In 1988 he founded America’s Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee awarded Cameron an honorary Doctor of Humanities degree in 1999 for a lifetime of work exhibiting materials of uncommon merit, moral and intellectual value to the city and state.

“This forceful and absorbing tale sweeps the reader through a wide range of emotions. The narrative is at once thrilling and unnerving–and interspersed with humor and philosophical reflections on humanity’s predicament. For incisive insights into the viciousness of white racism under Jim Crow–and the depths of the human spirit required to resist it, look no further. Cameron’s memoir is an inspired meditation on individual human endeavor, comparable to the trials and tribulations of Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas, but with an uplifting ending.” – Dr. Stephen Small, African American Studies, University of California–Berkeley, author of Living History: The Legacy of Slavery in the Netherlands.”