James Cameron was scheduled to be lynched in Marion, Ind., on Aug. 7, 1930.

The 89-year-old man sat in his wheelchair in front of a full auditorium in the Kellogg Center on Monday speaking in a slow and calm, yet strong, voice about his near-lynching experience.

Cameron, founder and director of America's Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, Wis., remembered the events vividly, as though they happened yesterday.

"One image I have is of standing next to death on either side of me," he said, referring to his friends Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, who had been hanged before him.

Aug. 6, 1930, ended like most days, he said. Cameron, who was 16 at the time, and his friends had just finished a game of horseshoes. Instead of going home, Shipp and Smith decided to rob a man and woman inside a parked car.

Cameron was against it but was convinced to hold a gun at the car.

"When I realized I knew the driver, he was a white friend of mine, I handed the gun to one of the others and took off," he said.

As Cameron was running, he heard the fatal gunshots that killed both people. But he didn't know which of his friends held the gun.

The next day, Shipp and Smith were taken out of the jail one by one and lynched.

Cameron was last.

As the noose was placed around his neck, he said he could only pray silently and wonder what they would do to him.

"A sigh of relief came over me when I said that prayer," he said. "I was glad to be leaving a world full of so many thoughtless and deceitful people."

It was then Cameron said he heard a voice he, to this day, believes belonged to God.

"A voice came and said, 'That boy didn't do anything wrong,'" he said. "Then I remember the mob of people became kindly and fell back like the Red Sea parted to the children of Israel. It was the most sweetest voice I ever heard."

Cameron was saved from hanging but went to jail for five years.

In 1988, he founded America's Black Holocaust Museum to promote the education of Black history, and in 1982, he self-published an autobiographical account of his story titled "A Time of Terror."

Curtis Stokes, director of the African American and African Studies Department, said it was an honor to hear Cameron speak.

"Cameron is a deeply religious and family man who devoted the rest of his life to promoting racial unity," Stokes said. "He became a street-level activist to end segregation in Indiana."