© Copyright 1999 James David Pearce

The festival was a big event in Hertford County in 1947, taking place in May, but akin to the famed "June Germans" held every year in Rocky Mount in tobacco warehouses.

Tobacco warehouses are big buildings, used only a few months of the year. Ahoskie had three, and they often were put to any other use that could be found in the off-season.

Every spring the biggest and cleanest of these big barns was lavishly decorated and outfitted with a stage, tables, sound systems and a large smooth section to be used as a dance floor.

The county was "country" to the core, but music-wise, the festival was anything but. In the days of "swing," the bands hired for the three days of the festival were really "big-time" swing: Tommy Dorsey, Guy Lombardo. The 1947 choice was Carmen Cavallaro.

On the final night of the '47 festival, the celebrants danced and partied until the county sheriff came onstage and called for attention. It was time for the drawing of tickets for the door prize, a brand-new Cadillac with all the trimmings.

In automobile-starved postwar days, such an event was a real attention-getter.

The party-goers gathered at the stage as Cavallaro's singer pulled a ticket and handed it to the sheriff. When he read the name, the reaction ranged from "Who's he?" to "Where does he live?"

When no one came forward to claim the Cadillac, the band got back into the swing of things. The crowd again filled the floor as the lights dimmed, and things continued "dreamy" for about 30 minutes.

Then the music stopped again and the sheriff took the stage again. He apologized for the interruption, and said they had just realized a "mistake" had been made and another drawing for the Cadillac was going to be necessary. This time, however, the singer left the stage and the sheriff drew the ticket.

Again, no one seemed to recognize the name, and again no winner came forward. The evening was wearing on, and the warehouse was beginning to fill with the haze of its principal product. The bemused crowd moved out for the final dance still not having seen or heard the happy voice of a new owner of a Cadillac.

That situation remained unchanged for several days, until word began to get around the county that the winner of the Cadillac was a wealthy physician from Virginia. In the first drawing, the name of a black man had been drawn.

Shortly after their three-night stand at the festival, the Cavallaro band traveled to Chicago. There a reporter asked the bandleader and the singer about their recent tour down South, and got an earful.

The reporter was told the singer had drawn the first name, and everybody seemed happy. But shortly afterward, a group of agitated festival officials came to them and said there would have to be another drawing; that the first one had been a "mistake" because a black man had won.

Cavallaro and the singer had reacted indignantly, saying that no way would they take part in a second drawing. It took some argument even to get Cavallaro to stop the music long enough to do it again.

The Chicago papers jumped on the story, and the national news-wire services joined the chorus.

LIFE magazine, the national weekly magazine of the day, came to town and with a center-spread of photos and captions, told a tawdry tale about "a little fly-specked town" in North Carolina.

The magazine showed the rich Virginia doctor, a white man, in the driveway of his home, with two Cadillacs – one he had recently bought himself and the one he had won. Another large photo showed the black man standing by the stoop of his backwoods shanty.

In the ensuing days, the story got worse as radio stations and newspapers told the world that the festival managers were planning to refund the dollar paid for the first-drawn ticket.

In the strictly segregated region, the event always had been "for whites only." In local rationalization, the argument was that the black man – knowing he couldn't get through the door – had no business buying a ticket. And the ticket salesman, also fully aware of Jim Crow, had made a "big mistake" by selling him one. The intention was to rectify the "mistake" with a brand-new one-dollar bill.

These news reports reinforced the firestorm, and local citizens, suffering under the continued barrage of national denunciation, decided something more had to be done.

In a last-ditch effort to salvage the situation, it was decided to give the holder of the first-pulled ticket the dollar-value of the Cadillac.

At first they offered him an equivalent Cadillac, but reportedly he turned that down, saying there was no way he could get any kind of car back into the swampy woods where he lived.

He took the $3,000, came out to the highway, bought a little piece of land and built himself a four-room house.

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Tobacco sales warehouse, Ahoskie, 2001