James Cameron (February 25, 1914 – June 11, 2006) was an American civil rights activist. In the 1940s, he founded three chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Indiana. He also served as Indiana's State Director of the Office of Civil Liberties from 1942 to 1950.

In the 1950s he moved with his family to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he continued as an activist and started speaking on African-American history. In 1988 he founded America's Black Holocaust Museum in the city, devoted to African-American history from slavery to the present.

Cameron was a survivor of a lynching attempt, which occurred when he was a 16-year-old suspect in a murder/robbery case in Marion, Indiana; two older teenagers were killed by the mob.

Cameron was born February 25, 1914, in La Crosse, Wisconsin, to James Herbert Cameron and Vera Carter. After his father left the family, they moved to Birmingham, Alabama, and then to Marion, Indiana. When James was 14, his mother remarried.

On August 7, 1930, when Cameron was 16 years old, he had gone out to play horseshoes before getting in a 1926 Ford Roadster driven by teenager Thomas Shipp, who soon picked up another teenager, Abram Smith. People said they attempted to rob a young white man, Claude Deeter, and killed him. Initial reports said that Shipp and Smith raped Deeter's fiancée, Mary Ball. Cameron said he ran away before the man was killed, and Ball could not identify him as one of the attackers.

The three youths were caught quickly, arrested, and charged the same night with robbery, murder and rape. A lynch mob broke into the jail where Cameron and his two friends were being held. According to Cameron's account, a lynch mob of 12,000–15,000 at the Grant County Courthouse Square took all three youths from the jail. The lynch mob killed the older two first: they took Shipp out of the cell and beat him, and hanged him from the bars of his jail window; Smith was dead from beating before the mob hanged both the boys from a tree in the square. The mob beat Cameron and put a noose around his neck; before he was hanged, the voice of an unidentified woman intervened, saying that he was innocent. The rope scarred Cameron's neck; years later, he bought a piece of it. The crowd parted ways and let Cameron stumble back to the jail.

Flossie Bailey, a local NAACP official, and the State Attorney General worked to gain indictments against leaders of the mob in the lynchings. A total of eight people were indicted for the lynching. However, all of the cases were dropped after two of the defendants were acquitted.

In 1931, Cameron was tried for being an accessory before the fact to the murder of Deeter. He was convicted on a lesser count of being an accessory before the fact to manslaughter and sentenced to two to 21 years in prison. He served four years at the Indiana State Prison before being paroled in 1935. Afterwards, Cameron moved to Detroit, Michigan, where he worked at Stroh Brewery Company and attended Wayne State University.