ABSTRACT
Early in the evening of August 7, 1930, a crowd began to congregate in downtown Marion, Indiana, a block from the courthouse and just in front of the county jail. Tension had been rising for hours in shops and pool halls, and as the workday ended, men from a nearby foundry grabbed sledgehammers and joined the gathering crowd. The jail held a number of inmates, but the crowd was assembling because of three African American boys: Tom Shipp, 19 years old, Abe Smith, 18, and James Cameron, 16. The three stood accused of attempting to rob a White couple parked on lover’s lane, fatally shooting the man, Claude Deeter, and raping his female companion, Mary Ball. (Deeter did die of a gunshot wound; most other details remain murky. For the full details, so far as they are known, see Madison [2001].)
