Shame Of Racism Lives On From The Groveland Four to Trump
Names like Norma Padgett and the Groveland Four should forever be burned into the collective memory of racist America.
It is especially important at a moment when the ex-president who once spread lies about President Barack Obama’s racial heritage now tells Vice President Camala Harris that she probably isn’t really Black and trump posts an old photo of the Democratic presidential hopeful Harris in an Indian sori as his absurd idea of proof.
It is important at a time when trump blows the racist dog whistle by saying that Harris may very well have been picked as vice president not because of her abilities but because she fit in the climate of diversity, equity and inclusion.
It is important at a time when neo-Nazis march in Nashville, Tenn., and a deputy is charged with murder after he shoots an unarmed Black woman in her Springfield, Ill., home after she called 911 for help.
Like so many other examples of violent racism in America, the claim by Norma Padgett that she was raped by four Black men in 1949 and the fate of the so-called “Groveland Four” have been largely scrubbed from America’s collective memory and conscience.
The Groveland Four were Ernest Thomas, Charles Greenlee, Samuel Shepherd, and Walter Irvin. In July 1949, the four were accused of raping Padgett, then a 17-year-old white woman, and severely beating her husband in Lake County, Fla. Their arrests and trials exemplified the horrors of racism in Jim Crow south, led by the notoriously cruel enforcer of Jim Crow laws, Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall.
Thomas, the oldest of the accused, tried to escape capture and was killed in the swamps of Florida by a vigilante posse. Shepard and Irvin, both 22, were tried and both received death sentences, while Greenlee, 16, was sentenced to life in prison. Shepard was shot and killed by McCall while he was transferring Shepard and Irvin to their appeal. In 1955, newly elected governor LeRoy Collins commuted Irvin’s sentence to life in prison, because he did not believe that the state established guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
Irvin was paroled in 1968 and was found dead in his car while returning to Lake County for a funeral a year later. Greenlee was paroled in 1960 and died in 2012.
The arrests and trials exposed a case rife with bogus evidence, allegedly coerced confessions and mistreatment and an unusual sentencing.
All four were posthumously exonerated by the state of Florida in 2019. Charges were never brought against any white law enforcement officers or prosecutors in the cases.
In 2018, Republican Gov.-elect Ron DeSantis said he would make it a priority to pardon the four young African-American men who were wrongly accused of raping a white woman nearly 70 years earlier.
“Seventy years is a long time,” DeSantis said. “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.”
Florida’s outgoing GOP governor Rick Scott and other Republicans on the state clemency board had refused to take up the pardon request.
Thomas, Shepherd, Irvin, and Greenlee were accused of raping Padgett and attacking her husband in the pre-dawn hours of July 16, 1949, in Groveland, Lake County, Fla. After walking several miles, Ms. Padgett arrived on foot at a dine-and-dance club in Okahumpka and asked the night watchman for a ride to her home down the road in Groveland, an agricultural town also in Lake County. Once there, Ms. Padgett told police that they were on their way home from a dance when their car stalled on a lonely road. They said that Shepherd, Irvin, Greenlee and Thomas had stopped to help them. Willie Padgett claimed that the four attacked him and left him on the side of the road while they drove off with his wife, who told police that she was raped numerous times.
Thomas fled but was killed by a sheriff’s posse of 1,000 white men when they found him asleep under a tree around 200 miles from the scene of the alleged rape. A coroner’s inquest was unable to determine who had killed Thomas, as he was shot around 400 times.
As word spread about the arrest of the three, a crowd of an estimated 200 cars carrying 500 to 600 men demanded that McCall turn the three men over to them to be lynched. McCall had hidden the suspects in a nearby orange grove but told the mob they had been transferred to the state prison. McCall promised that he would see that justice was done and urged them to “let the law handle this calmly.”
Unable to find the three, the mob drove to Groveland and began shooting into Black homes and set them afire. A number of Black-owned homes were damaged and the home of Henry Shepherd was destroyed. The mob set up blockades on the highway into Groveland and waited for unsuspecting Black men. On July 18, the National Guard was called and restored order.
NAACP attorney Franklin Williams met with the three suspects and found their bodies covered with cuts and bruises. The three told Williams that they had been hung from pipes with their feet touching broken glass and clubbed.
Williams doubted the rape had occurred as a white restaurant owner who gave Padgett a ride after the alleged rape said she did not appear upset and did not mention the rape. Also, she did not claim to have been raped until after talking with her husband.
Greenlee, Irvin and Shepherd were convicted by an all-white jury. Evidence was withheld at trial that could have exonerated them, including a doctor’s conclusion that the teen probably wasn’t raped. Greenlee was sentenced to life, and Irvin and Shepherd to death.
Thurgood Marshall, later the first African-American justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, took up Irvin and Shepherd’s appeals for the NAACP, and in 1951 the high court ordered new trials.
In November 1951, McCall was transporting Shepherd and Irvin from Raiford to Tavares for the retrial. The sheriff pulled off to a country road and claimed the car had tire trouble. McCall swore in a deposition that Shepherd and Irvin, who were handcuffed to each other, attacked him while trying to escape and that he shot them both in self-defense. Shepherd was killed on the spot, and Irvin was shot three times, but he survived. During the incident Deputy James Yates also arrived and, according to Irvin, stood over him and shot him again while he was wounded.
Ambulances took McCall and Irvin to Waterman Hospital in Eustis. McCall was treated for a concussion and facial injuries and Irvin for his gunshot wounds. At the hospital, Irvin met with NAACP lawyers, and later told the press that McCall shot him and Shepherd without provocation, as did Yates.
In 1949, Harry T. Moore, the executive director of the Florida NAACP, organized a campaign against the wrongful conviction of the three African Americans. Two years later, the case of two of the defendants reached the U.S. Supreme Court on appeal, with aid of special counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Thurgood Marshall.
In 1951, the Supreme Court ordered a retrial after hearing the appeals of Shepherd and Irvin. It ruled they had not received a fair trial because no evidence had been presented, because of excessive adverse publicity, and because Black people had been excluded from the jury. The court overturned the convictions and remanded the case to the lower court for a new trial.
Moore and the NAACP had challenged segregation and law enforcement. In the 1940s and the early 1950s, Moore helped to register tens of thousands of Blacks people, who had been essentially disenfranchised since a new state constitution at the turn of the century. Moore also was a likely target of the area Ku Klux Klan.
After the convictions and sentencing in the Groveland case, Moore asked the governor to suspend McCall from office and investigate allegations of prisoner abuse. Six weeks later, on Christmas night in 1952, a bomb exploded under the Moore's’ home in Mims. The blast was so loud it could be heard several miles away in Titusville. Moore died while being transported to Sanford, the closest place where a Black man could be hospitalized. His wife, Harriette, died nine days later from injuries sustained in the blast. The couple celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary on the day of the explosion.
An FBI investigation at the time and later separate FBI and Justice Department investigations failed to produce evidence linking McCall to the bombing. In 2005, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement excavated the site of the bombing as part of a new investigation. On August 16, 2006, Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist announced that after a 20-month investigation, four now-dead suspects were named: Earl Brooklyn, Tillman Belvin, Joseph Cox and Edward Spivey. All four had a long history with the Ku Klux Klan and served as officers in the Orange County Klavern. The investigation reported finding no link between McCall and Moore.
The Moores were killed 12 years before Medgar Evers, 14 years before Malcolm X, and 17 years before Martin Luther King, Jr., making them the first martyrs of the contemporary civil rights movement. The Moore Cultural Complex in Mims features a civil rights museum and a replica of the Moore family home.
McCall was elected sheriff for seven consecutive terms from 1944 to 1972. During his 28-year tenure as sheriff, McCall was investigated many times for civil rights violations and inmate abuse and was tried for murder but was never convicted. He also enforced anti-miscegenation laws and was a segregationist.
McCall lost his bid for an eighth term shortly after he had been acquitted of the murder in 1972 of Tommy J. Vickers, a mentally disabled Black prisoner who died in his custody. In 2007, the Lake County Commission voted unanimously to change a road named in McCall’s honor 20 years before because of his history as a “bully lawman whose notorious tenure was marked by charges of racial intolerance, brutality and murder.”
One of the many cruel highlights of McCall’s tenure came in 1956 after the sheriff arrested two interracial couples in a Florida cabin. The four were charged with violating Floridia’s anti-miscegenation law after the sheriff’s deputies offered to throw the Black men “to the alligators.”
The FBI investigated and no action was taken against McCall, who was re-elected to his fourth term as sheriff. His supporters celebrated McCall for his “efficiency and untiring efforts” in punishing “the ravages of Negroes upon white women and girls.”
In 1972, McCall, then 62, was charged with kicking a Black prisoner to death in a jailhouse attack. McCall was indicted on a charge of second‐degree murder by a grand jury in the death of Tommy J. Vickers, 37, of Miami on April 23.
Vickers was jailed when the mentally disabled Black man could not post a $26 bond for a minor traffic violation. He died in a hospital 11 days later. The grand jury said that Vickers had been kicked, beaten and forced into a small, windowless sheet‐metal cell, where he lay for six days in his own excrement. Vickers died in the hospital of acute peritonitis from a blow to the lower abdomen. McCall was accused of kicking and beating Vickers to death for throwing his food on the floor.
The grand jury also indicted McCall on charges of aggravated assault and aggravated battery. An all-white jury later acquitted him. Days after his trial for the murder of Vickers, McCall narrowly lost his re-election bid in November 1972.
In 1985, the Lake County Board of County Commissioners named the road by his house, County Road 450A (CR 450A), as Willis V. McCall Road in his honor. More than 20 years later, the South Umatilla Neighborhood Association, a group of Black residents on the road, asked the Lake County Commission to change the name of the road, as they objected to its honoring a man with such a history. The commission members unanimously voted to change the road’s name back to County Road 450A. McCall died on April 28, 1994, at the age of 84.
Charles Greenlee and his four siblings were all in school when the rape was alleged. Greenlee’s father worked in turpentine manufacturing in 1935 and later as a laborer, likely in the timber industry.
Walter Lee Irvin was living in Groveland when he registered for the draft in May 1945. He was working at the time for Apshawa Groves. He was recorded as 5'3" and weighed 105 pounds and was described in his registration as “light brown” with brown eyes and black hair. He served in the Army and was discharged with the rank of private.
Samuel Shepherd’s family moved to Groveland where his father achieved ownership of a farm by clearing and developing former swamp land. When Samuel Shepherd registered for the draft in 1945, he was described as 5'8", 149 pounds, with a light brown complexion, brown eyes and black hair.
Ernest Thomas was married at the time of the alleged rape and was living and working near Groveland. He had encouraged Greenlee to come to Groveland because of jobs related to the citrus groves.
After returning to Groveland following their military service, Shepherd and Irvin both continued to wear their uniforms. They were proud of their service but were resented by some of the local whites, including Sheriff McCall.
Padgett died on July. She was 92 and never changed her story that she had been raped and her husband was beaten by the Groveland Four.