Righting wrongs for Groveland 4
Apology, exoneration, restitution. Justice served – finally — for the Groveland Four, the four young black men accused of raping a white woman in the late 1940s by notorious racist Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall.
The Legislature and Gov. Ron DeSantis has approved awarding $1 million each to the families of relatives were the victims of one of the most shameful incidents of racial injustice during the darkest days of segregation.
“The evidence strongly suggests that a sheriff, a judge, and prosecutor all but guaranteed guilty verdicts in this case,” read the initial court motion filed by State Attorney Bill Gladson in 2021.
Long time coming? Yes, and no amount of money can begin to erase the pain and suffering. But this year, in the nation’s 250th anniversary, it demonstrates that America, as imperfect as it can be at times, still strives for freedom and justice.
Gladson, the 5th Circuit’s elected prosecutor, could have done nothing. Lawmakers could have resisted making a formal apology in 2017, the state granting posthumous pardons in 2019, and Circuit Judge Heidi Davis could have resisted dismissing the indictments in 2021 of Ernest Thomas and Samuel Shepherd, setting aside the judgments and sentences of Charles Greenlee and Walter Irvin, and correcting the record.
I was privileged to cover the public exoneration for the Daily Commercial.
The facts are outrageous and shameful in the extreme.
Thomas was shot and killed by a mob posse before he could be arrested. Greenlee, 16, received a recommendation of mercy from the jury. Irvin and Shepherd received a death sentence.
The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the death sentences and ordered new trials for them.
McCall, while bringing the two men back to Lake County, shot and killed Shepherd and wounded Irvin, claiming they were trying to escape. Irwin said they were not.
Righting the wrong also demonstrates the power of the press. Gladson did his homework by meeting with Gilbert King, the Pulitizer-Prize winning author of Devil In the Grove, an investigative book about the case.
The book praises another journalist, Mable Norris Reese, who at the time was an editor with the Mount Dora Topic newspaper. She battled McCall, seeking the truth until she was threatened and run out of town.
One can only hope that the U.S.A. will continue to champion just causes and fight for freedom.
Sometimes it seems the nation’s moral compass is spinning. The country is politically divided, rhetoric can be raw, evil still exists, and democracy is threatened by radicals. But doing the right thing is as American as the red, white and blue.
