The Groveland Four Are Pardoned, 70 Years After Jim Crow-Era Rape Case

The Groveland Four — Charles Greenlee, Ernest Thomas, Walter Irvin and Samuel Shepherd — were accused of the rape in 1949 near the city of Groveland in Lake County, Florida. Thomas was killed shortly thereafter, and the other three were taken into custody, beaten, and eventually convicted. Shepherd was later shot and killed by the county sheriff.

Greenlee and Irvin were each imprisoned for more than a decade and released on parole. Both have since died, but for years, their families have insisted on their innocence and fought for their pardons.

“I wanted two things to happen,” said Carol Greenlee, Greenlee’s daughter, in an interview Friday. “I wanted the world to know the truth, and I wanted my daddy’s name cleared.”

State officials voted in favor of the pardon at a meeting with DeSantis on Friday morning in Tallahassee. Carol Greenlee, 69, and several relatives of the Groveland Four gave testimonies at the meeting. So did Norma Padgett, the woman who said she was raped by the young men in 1949, when she was 17.

She said that her accusations back then were true. “I’m begging y’all not to give them pardon,” she said.

But DeSantis appeared convinced that the men had been wrongly convicted. “I don’t know that there’s any way you can look at this case and think that those ideals of justice were satisfied,” DeSantis said. “Indeed, they were perverted, time and time again.”

The Jim Crow-era case attracted widespread attention in 1949. Shortly after the rape was reported, mobs of white residents set fire to homes and property belonging to black families in the Groveland area.

Padgett and her husband had said they were on the side of the road with a broken-down car when the four men attacked him and raped her.

Three of the men were arrested that night, but Thomas ran. He was eventually tracked down by a posse of men in the woods and killed in what has been described as a hail of gunfire.

NAACP lawyers, including Franklin Williams and Thurgood Marshall, took an active role in the men’s defense. They argued that Greenlee and Thomas were nowhere near the scene of the alleged crime, that beatings had led to forced confessions, and that important pieces of evidence, including a medical examination of Padgett, were never presented in court.

But an all-white jury sentenced Irvin and Shepherd to death, and Greenlee to life in prison.

Irvin and Shepherd appealed to the Supreme Court, and their convictions were unanimously overturned in 1951. But shortly thereafter, the sheriff of Lake County, Willis V. McCall, was driving the two men to a court appearance when he pulled over and shot them both. He said that he did it in self-defense.

Shepherd died. Irvin survived. But at his retrial, another all-white jury sentenced him to death, again. That sentence was later commuted to life in prison. Greenlee and Irvin were each paroled more than 50 years ago, but Irvin died a year after his release.

Greenlee did not talk about the case very much, according to his daughter — in part because he barely knew what had happened, having suddenly been arrested alongside two men he had never met before.

She said she learned more when a book about the case, “Legal Lynching: The Sad Saga of the Groveland Four,” by Gary Corsair, was published in 2004. Greenlee died in 2012, the same year that another book about the case, “Devil in the Grove,” by Gilbert King, was published. It would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize.

The Orlando Sentinel, which reported on the case when it was called the Orlando Morning Sentinel, apologized for its coverage this week.

The paper said in an editorial Thursday that it had “inflamed the public” by running a cartoon showing electric chairs, effectively suggesting the death penalty just as the grand jury was convening; and that it had portrayed McCall too favorably, among other things.

“We’re sorry that our coverage of the event and its aftermath lent credibility to the cover-up and the official, racist narrative,” the editorial said.

In 2017, the state of Florida formally apologized to the families of the Groveland Four. That helped to pave the way for Friday’s pardon under DeSantis, who was inaugurated earlier this week.

Carol Greenlee said she was feeling overwhelmed and happy with the decision. “It takes a load off of you,” she said. “It takes away the guilt of the past.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.