Cadillac for Harvey

Country Editor George W. Haskett smelt a rat. Some news had filtered into Elizabeth City (N.C.) from nearby Ahoskie that didn't make sense. He sniffed further, and pretty soon he had the rat by the tail. He hung it high in the editorial column of his semiweekly Independent.

The story he had nabbed wasn't pretty: the Ahoskie Kiwanis Club had raffled off a $3,200 Cadillac at a dance for the local poor, and the winning ticket went to a Negro. The dismayed Kiwanians sent a three-man committee (including the sheriff, a Kiwanian) out to the winner's one-horse farm to tell him. that he couldn't have the car. The committee was generous about it. It gave 25-year-old Harvey Jones, an ex-G.L, his dollar back. Then the Kiwanians held another drawing, and this time the winner was a well-to-do white dentist.

Wrote Southern Editor Haskett: "The whole transaction was rotten . . . ungentlemanly, unsportsmanlike . . . worthy of no praise. . . ." Last week, thanks to his editorial, the U.S. press went to town on the case of Harvey Jones. Josephus Daniels' Raleigh News & Observer picked up the story first and its 85-year-old publisher sternly told Ahoskie off. United Press (14 hours ahead of the napping A.P.) took the story from there. Manhattan's underdog-loving PM launched a "Cadillac for Jones" fund. Kiwanis' national president, a North Carolinian himself, told the Ahoskie club to give Harvey a Cadillac. It wasn't easy. The dentist wouldn't give back his car, and Cadillacs are not easily come by. The Ahoskie Kiwanians finally placed an order (delivery date uncertain) for a Cadillac for Harvey. Said he wistfully: "I believe I'd rather have the money. ..."

From Louisville came word of another raffle. There a white man won an automobile in a drawing sponsored by a Negro sorority. The Negro committee didn't even think of taking it away from him.

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