Killing a Negro isn’t much fun, according to Frank V. Scott of Elizabeth City. Mr. Scott didn’t kill one, but he almost killed two on the North Carolina-Virigina Highway near St. Brides, Va., Monday afternoon.
Mr. Hudson was driving his Hudson coach, headed for Norfolk, at a speed of 35 miles an hour when a Ford touring car with two Negroes on the front seat came out of a ross road and stopped in the middle of the main highway right in his path. Mr. Scott didn’t have time to stop. His wife and Mrs. J. C. B. Ehrinhaus were in the car with him, he couldn’t ditch his car to save two men and endanger of the lives of Mrs. Scott and Mrs. Ehringhaus. So he just hit that Ford touring car head on with a force that sent the Ford rolling over and over for a distance of 40 feet or more. The Ford was completely wrecked. Mr. Scott’s own car looked like a wreck, the impact driving his radiator into the engine, crumpling up the hood, stripping one fender, smashing is headlights and taking off a front tire. Neither Mr. Scott nor his companions were injured.
But the two Negroes looked like dead men when Mr. Scott went to them. The eyes of one were set as in death and no heart beat could be detected. “I tell you, it gave me a wretched, sickly feeling,” said Mr. Scott. The Negroes were carried to a Norfolk hospital and an examination revealed only external injuries of no serious nature.
A Virginia magistrate who investigated the wreck exonerated Mr. Scott. The accident was one of that unavoidable sort. The poor Negroes just don’t know why they stopped sideways plumb in the middle of a fast highway with Frank Scott on the road.
From the front page of the Independent, Elizabeth City, N.C., Friday, Oct. 1, 1926
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn83025812/1926-10-01/ed-1/seq-1/
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