Florida Folk History

Four African-American men accused of raping a white woman in 1949 have been pardoned. In January of 2019, after 72 years, the state clemency board approved a posthumous pardon for “The Groveland Four,” Samuel Shepherd, Walter Irving, Charles Greenlee and Ernest Thomas.

The Lake County men were accused of the 1949 rape under dubious circumstances.

Thomas was was hunted down by a posse of about 1,000 men and shot more than 400 times. The three other men were beaten to coerce confessions before they were convicted by an all-white jury.

Greenlee, at 16, was given a life sentence. Shepherd and Irvin, both U.S. Army veterans, were sentenced to death. Shepherd and Irvin were later shot, with Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall claiming the two handcuffed men tried to flee while being transported to a new trial. Shepherd died. Irvin told the FBI he was shot in cold blood.

Gov. Ron DeSantis, new Attorney General Ashley Moody, new Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried and returning Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis held the meeting Friday at the Capitol.

“Seventy years is a long time,” DeSantis said in the Dec. 20 statement. “And that’s the amount of time four young men have been wrongly written into Florida history for crimes they did not commit and punishments they did not deserve. Justice was miscarried for the Groveland Four beginning with events set in motion in 1949. Though these men now lie in graves, their stories linger in search of justice.”

In 2017, the Legislature approved a resolution apologizing to the Groveland Four and calling for pardons. The resolution said the men were “victims of gross injustices and that their abhorrent treatment by the criminal justice system is a shameful chapter in this state’s history.”

Under state law, the governor and Cabinet serve as the clemency board.

It was July 16, 1949 in Groveland, Florida. 17-year-old white woman Norma Padgett and her husband, Willie, claimed they had been attacked by four young Black men while their car was stalled on the side of the road. Willie claimed he was assaulted, and Norma claimed she had been taken away and raped.

On Friday, newly appointed Governor Ron DeSantis has given a posthumous pardon to The Groveland Four—Charles Greenlee, Walter Lee Irvin, Samuel Shepherd, and Earnest Thomas.

Yet while this is a step forward in both recognizing and healing from Florida’s dark, racist past, there are many who feel this action is too little, too late.

As Govorner DeSantis so poignantly addressed, for 70 years now, these young men have been written into Florida history for crimes they did not commit and punishments they did not deserve.

Meanwhile, the false accusers, racist law enforcement, and lynch mob of over 1000 people have received no punishment, and barely get their names mentioned.

It is my belief that these people should have their legacies forever stained by their inhuman actions. So, here are the names of the REAL guilty parties in the Groveland case and their REAL crimes:

NORMA AND WILLIE PADGETT: Lied to law enforcement about an assault, abduction, and rape leading to the torture, murder, and imprisonment of four innocent black men.

LAKE COUNTY SHERIFF WILLIS MCCALL—shot Sam Shepherd and Walter Irvin in cold blood while they were in handcuffs, claiming they tried to escape. A segregationist who enforced miscegenation laws, elected for seven consecutive terms from 1944 to 1972. He lost his bid for an eighth term shortly after being acquitted of the murder in 1972 of Tommy Vickers, a mentally disabled black prisoner who died in his custody. Harry T. Moore, executive director of the Florida NAACP, demanded in 1951 that McCall be indicted for murder following the Groveland rape case, and requested that the Governor suspend him from office. Six weeks after calling for McCall’s removal, Moore and his wife were killed by a bomb that exploded under their bedroom in Mims in Brevard County on Christmas night 1951. Rumors alleged that McCall was behind the bombing.

et no individual could do as much harm as the Padgetts or Sheriff McCall if they were not insulated by a society that not only tolerated white supremacy and racism, but institutionalized it.

When the shocking accusation reached the ears of residents in town, a lynch mob 1000 strong met at the Groveland High School and pursued Earnest Thomas through the swamps.

FLOWERS COCKCROFT was one of the leaders of the mob. They hunted Thomas down and shot him over 400 times. The coroner’s jury determined that Thomas had been lawfully killed and ruled his death a justifiable homicide

When the other “Groveland Boys” were not turned over to them, the mob turned its sights towards the black section of Groveland. They shot the tavern owned by the mother of Thomas, and hurled insults at any Blacks they found.

After that, the mob moved in and proceeded to burn Shepherd’s house and two others to the ground. The presence of the National Guard halted the destruction caused by the rioters; but they were not satisfied. COCKCROFT revealed the mob’s intentions when he told a reporter, “The next time, we’ll clean out every Negro section in south Lake County.”
.
DEPUTIES JAMES YATES AND LEROY CAMPBELL were responsible for the beatings used to coerce confessions out of the remaining Groveland Boys, and agents documented the physical abuse with photographs.

Shepherd’s injuries included scars on head, broken teeth, tooth puncture of upper lip, lash scars across back and chest, and scars on the wrist, which supported Shepherd’s claim that he had been cuffed to a metal pipe.

Irvin had similar injuries: body scars, wide bruises, lash marks, scars across wrists, and an apparently fractured jaw.

Greenlee’s injuries included a red and bruised left eye, scars on the right cheekbone and around the neck and groin, swollen testicles, and numerous cuts on his feet.

DEPUTIES YATES and CAMPBELL had also beaten the prisoners while making them stand on broken glass, hands tied to a pipe above their head.

On Friday, 89-year-old and wheelchair-bound NORMA PADGETT dramatically maintained that she had been raped by the Groveland Four In 1949, begging the State not to pardon them while surrounded by her sons. This was the first time she had spoken out about the incident since then.
.
“My mom don’t lie,” Curtis Upshaw said last week. “She’s a good Christian lady.”
.
This differs from the records of her examining physician at the time of the alleged attack, Dr. Geoffrey, who determined he simply could not tell if she had actually been raped due to lack of evidence. He found no evidence of tears or wounds in the vagina. Laboratory analysis of a vaginal smear revealed no spermatozoa present in the vagina, nor any organisms resembling gonococci, which could have been other evidence of sex. There were no other gross signs of bruises, breaks in the skin or other signs of violence.

This, along with other evidence that PADGETT had perjured herself, and that the community had conspired against the Groveland Four to make scapegoats out of them—such as the torture and beatings used to coerce confessions, and that the sheriff’s office fabricated footprint evidence that supposedly linked the men to the crime scene—ultimately proved that the men had been falsely accused, convicted, and imprisoned, and a pardon was granted.

Beverly Robinson, a cousin of Sam Shepherd, minced no words when she turned to NORMA PADGETT and her family to defend the men’s innocence, simply saying, “You are all liars.”

Now that we have looked at the true criminals in the Groveland Four case, I want to shift focus onto the lives and legacies of the innocent men who were at the center of this horrific miscarriage of justice.

EARNEST THOMAS, pictured here with a woman who may or may not have been his wife, was married in 1949. He was living and working in Groveland and encouraged his friend Charles Greenlee to join him, due to the abundance of jobs in the citrus industry.

Greenlee was waiting at a rail depot to meet Earnest when he was arrested and brought to the police station under suspicion.

Greenlee was interrogated and beaten in a cell that night until he admitted to the rape of Norma Padgett, admitting to having been with Earnest.

Earnest escaped capture and fled Lake County the following morning. Police soon learned where where he was hiding, as they found a letter in his letterbox addressed to his wife.

Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall appointed a posse that tracked Thomas down days later, 200 miles away in Madison County, Florida. He was shot over 400 times and killed by the more-than-1,000-man lynch mob. officers reported that Earnest was armed and reached for his weapon.

The NAACP later said that the posse had never intended to arrest Earnest, but to kill him. According to the coroner’s inquest, Lake County Sheriff McCall was at the scene when Earnest was shot. The coroner’s jury determined that Earnest had been lawfully killed and ruled his death a justifiable homicide.

CHARLES GREENLEE was just sixteen years old when hitchhiked all the way from Gainesville to Lake County to pick fruit in July, 1949.

The youngest of the Groveland Four, Charles was a friend of Earnest Thomas, who convinced him he could earn more money in the Lake County orange groves than at his dish-washing job in Gainesville.

He arrived in Lake County on July 15, and was in jail a day later after a night watchman found him with an unloaded pistol.

The gun belonged to Thomas, who had asked him to hold it for him.

After a jailhouse beating by deputies, Charles confessed to participating in the rape in the back seat of a car on a roadside near Okahumpka, though it was determined later that he was miles away from the alleged crime scene and already in custody on suspicion of an unrelated crime when the sexual assault allegedly happened.

By that fall, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

Because he was not sentenced to death like co-defendants Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin, Charles didn’t appeal and spent a dozen years in prison until he was paroled in 1962.

He married and raised a family in Tennessee, where he built a successful heating and cooling maintenance business, said his son, Thomas Greenlee.

Charles died at age 78 in 2012, without ever stepping foot again in Groveland.

a WALRER IRVIN, seen here with special counsel Thurgood Marshall, was 22 when he was arrested for the crime of rape.

Walter was born in Gainesville to parents whose ancestors had been freed from slavery. His family had independently established themselves in the Black community of Groveland. Irvin was determined not to work in the orange groves for white planters.

A WWII veteran, Walter was the only one of the Groveland Four who could not be beaten or tortured into confessing. He maintained that he had not raped Norma Padgett even after he had been shot by the sheriff and sentenced to death in the electric chair.

Despite his denials and evidence that he was in Orlando with close friend Samuel Shepherd at the time of the alleged rape in Lake County, Walter was twice convicted and sentenced to death. The first verdict was overturned unanimously in 1951 by the U.S. Supreme Court.

He was shot by McCall as the sheriff drove him and Shepherd back to Lake County for a new trial.

A rigid segregationist, McCall claimed the prisoners tried to overpower him when he stopped the vehicle to check a tire. Walter survived the shooting by playing dead, but Shepherd died.

Walter was defended at the second trial by famed civil-rights attorney Thurgood Marshall, who in 1967 would become the high court’s first black justice. The retrial was moved to Marion County but another all-white jury returned another guilty verdict and, once again, Walter was sentenced to die in the electric chair.

A last-minute stay of his execution was granted in 1954, and his sentence was commuted to life by Gov. LeRoy Collins.

He was paroled in January 1968 and moved to Miami to be near his sister, Henrietta.

Conditions of his parole barred him from returning to Lake County, but in 1969 he received permission to attend an uncle’s funeral there. Only hours after his return to the place that forever scarred his life, Walter died at age 40. He was found dead in his car, apparently of natural causes.

He is buried in Groveland’s Black cemetery. A grave marker bears symbols identifying him as a World War II veteran and a Christian.

SAMUEL SHEPHERD was the 22–year-old son of a prosperous Black Groveland farmer in the summer of 1949, when he was falsely accused of rape along with three other young black men.

He was born in Fitzgerald, Georgia to Henry Shepherd, a lumber industry worker, and his wife, Charlie.

The Shepherd family moved to Groveland, where Sam’s father achieved ownership of his own farm by clearing and developing former swampland.

A veteran of World War II, “Sammie” was known to wear his Army uniform around town. He and Walter Irvin were friends and fellow veterans after the War.

The day after the rape allegation, his father’s home was burned to the ground by a mob and his family and other blacks fled in fear for their lives.

The National Guard was summoned to keep the peace in Groveland.

Meanwhile, in Tavares, Sam’s jailers beat a rape confession out of the former soldier and he was convicted with his three co-defendants later that year.

A U.S. Supreme Court overturned that conviction, but Sam never got to stand trial again because he was shot by McCall, along with Irvin. Irvin survived, but Sam died on the scene.

An all-white coroner’s jury, made up of many of McCall’s friends, took half an hour to find Shepherd’s death justified. They concluded that McCall had been acting in line of duty and in self-defense. McCall was cleared of any wrongdoing.