This 3rd edition of Dr. James Cameron’s memoir includes never-before-published chapters. It begins with a Foreword by James W. Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, explaining how Cameron’s story offers a corrective understanding of American history. The Introduction by educator Fran Kaplan and historian Robert S. Smith gives the reader an easily grasped and thorough grounding in the cultural context of young Cameron’s life.

In Our Town, journalist Cynthia Carr explores the issues of race, loyalty, and memory in America through the lens of a specific hate crime that occurred in Marion but could have happened anywhere. The brutal lynching of two young black men in Marion, Indiana, on August 7, 1930, cast a shadow over the town that still lingers. It is only one event in the long and complicated history of race relations in Marion, a history much ignored and considered by many to be best forgotten. But the lynching cannot be forgotten. It is too much a part of the fabric of Marion, too much ingrained even now in the minds of those who live there.

Since its first publication in 1995, Lies My Teacher Told Me has become one of the most important―and successful―history books of our time. Having sold nearly two million copies, the book also won an American Book Award and the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship and was heralded on the front page of the New York Times.

ABHM builds public awareness of the harmful legacies of slavery and Jim Crow in America and promotes racial repair, reconciliation, and healing. The museum was founded in 1988 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin by Dr. James Cameron, the only known survivor of a lynching.