Lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith
J. Thomas Shipp and Abraham S. Smith were African-American boys who were murdered in a spectacle lynching by a group of thousands on August 7, 1930, in Marion, Indiana. They were taken from jail cells, beaten, and hanged from a tree in the county courthouse square. They had been arrested that night as suspects in a robbery, murder and rape case. A third African-American suspect, 16-year-old James Cameron, had also been arrested and narrowly escaped being killed by the mob; an unknown woman and a local sports hero intervened, and he was returned to jail. Cameron later stated that Shipp and Smith had committed the murder but that he had run away before that event.
Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, August 7, 1930
Marion is a city in and the county seat of Grant County, Indiana, United States, along the Mississinewa River. The population was 28,310 as of the 2020 census. It is named for Francis Marion, a brigadier general from South Carolina in the American Revolutionary War.
Grant County Courthouse
Streetcars in Marion, 1891
VA hospital campus (left) south of Marion's downtown
Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, lynched in Marion on August 7, 1930