Memorial honors 4 Black men wrongfully accused of rape
2nd March 2020 · 0 Comments
By Frederick H. Lowe
Contributing Writer
(BlackmansStreet.Today) — A memorial honoring four Black men who were arrested for raping a white woman, including two murdered by police before or shortly after the trial, was unveiled recently in front of the Lake County, Florida, Historical Museum in Tavares.
The men, known as the Groveland Four, named for the town Groveland, Florida, were Charles Greenlee, Walter Irvin, Samuel Shepherd and Ernest Thomas.
Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall led a posse of 1,000 armed men who murdered Thomas before he had been charged with rape. McCall also murdered Irvin while driving him to prison from the Lake County, Florida, jail.
Police charged three of the four men with raping Norma Padgett in 1949. They were convicted and either sentenced to death or to life in prison for the alleged rape, based solely on Padgett’s word, although a physical examination by a doctor proved she had not been raped.
Irvin refused to confess to the crime.
Thomas escaped, but he was hunted down by a posse of more than 1,000 men who shot him 400 times as he slept under a tree. He had not yet been charged with a crime.
In 1951, Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall was transporting Irvin and Shepherd from Raiford State Prison back to the Lake County jail in Tavares when he claimed to have a flat tire.
Alone with the two handcuffed prisoners, McCall drove down a dirt road supposedly to inspect one of the car’s tires, outside Umatilla, Florida, north of Tavares. He said Shepherd asked to urinate, and the two prisoners, cuffed together, got out of the car.
McCall claimed the men attempted to escape by attacking him. He shot them both three times. Shepherd, a World War 2 veteran, was killed, but Irvin, also veteran, pretended he was dead and survived. Both men were proud to wear their uniforms.
On January 11, 2019, Governor DeSantis pardoned the four 70 years after police arrested and tortured them.
Black men falsely accused of rape by white women has been commonplace in the nation’s history.
In another case, Irene Tuskin, 19, claimed she had been raped by three Black men on June 15, 1920 in Duluth, Minnesota. A physician examined Tuskin, determining she had not been raped.
A white mob knocked the sheriff out of the way, dragged the men from the jail and lynched Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson and Isaac McGhie. Their murders are detailed in the 1979 book “The Lynchings in Duluth.”
Later, Duluth erected a monument to honor the three men after determining they were innocent and that Tuskin had lied.
DeSantis called the conviction of the four a “miscarriage of justice” and that a pardon “brought justice to the historical record.”
The families of the four men now are seeking a full exoneration by the state, which would declare they never raped Pagett, who was 17 at the time. She is now 80.
The entire set of events is told in the 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Devil in the Grove,” by Gilbert King. The complete title is “Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America.”
This article originally published in the March 2, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
