“Today the Florida clemency board pardoned the so called
Groveland four. The four African American men were accused of
raping a white woman in 1949.
Family, It never happened. you all are liars.”
You want an idea of how slow justice can be for
black people in America,
well, here’s an example.
On July 16, 1949, a 17-year-old white woman
named Norma Padgett and her husband told
police four young black men raped and kidnapped
her after their car broke down in Groveland, Florida.
On January 2019, Earnest Thomas, Samuel Shepherd,
Walter Irving and Charles Greenlee were pardoned after
being falsely accused of rape,
seven decades later.
But this pardon may come
as little refuge to the families of these men, for the story is
truly incomprehensibly tragic.
Just two years ago, Vivian Shepard sat in the
Florida House of Representatives and listened
as an official apology was offered for the “gross injustices”
in the case of the Groveland Boys, one of them
was Samuel Shepherd— her uncle that she’d never met.
During World War II, Vivian’s grandfather
Henry Shepherd purchased 55
acres of swampland in Groveland, Florida
and spent several years renovating the property to
make it into something of value.
Once he was finished however,
poor white farmers tried to force
Henry Shepard from his land.
And despite countless complaints, the local sheriff,
WIlliam McCall, did nothing, stating on record,
‘no n-word has a right to file a claim against a white man’.
Now one of the families that owned adjacent
land and had previously tried to intimidate the Shepherds into
leaving was the Padgett family.
Their daughter, Norma Padgett.
She was involved in a turbulent and at times violent
relationship with her husband, Willie.
one night, According to records, they
tried to patch things up, so they went
drinking and dancing, only for Norma to turn up outside a café,
claiming that four black men had raped her.
One of those accused was Samuel Shepherd.
Within hours Shepherd and Walter Irvin,
22-year-old childhood friends and army buddies - yes veterans -
from Groveland, were arrested, taken into the basement beneath
the Lake County jail, and severely beaten by deputies.
Sixteen-year-old Charles Greenlee was also arrested and beaten,
and a fourth suspect, who did not know Shepherd or Irving,
Ernest Thomas, was hunted down by a posse
and shot dead in a north Florida swamp.
After word spread about four black men
raping a white woman, local Klan members descended on
the town and began burning black homes.
One of them, Henry Shepherd’s house,
which was reduced to ashes.
In 1951, after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned
his son’s guilty verdict,
Sheriff Willis McCall decided to personally transport
the defendants from prison back to Lake County for the retrial.
McCall turned down a dark alley, stopped his car, pulled his gun,
and executed Samuel Shepherd.
Walter Irvin, handcuffed to his best friend,
was shot three times, but he survived to tell
the FBI the story of cold blooded murder.
But Walter was given a few weeks to recover,
then returned to the courtroom
to face trial for the rape of Norma Padgett.
He was convicted by 12 white jurors and sentenced to death.
However, his sentence was commuted to
life in prison
It was 68 years before an official apology
would be offered by the Florida government,
and then a further two years before
they pardoned these men.
Last week Norma Padgett, now 87, sat in
the audience and demanded they not be pardoned.
Despite a history of inaccuracies in her story,
a plethora of racist epithets,
and even claims that she visited James Shepherd,
a relative of Samuel Shepard, to apologize for something that
according to his statement, she said ‘never happened,'
but yet she remained vigilant
in her attempts to prevent their pardoning.
Her attempts failed.
They were pardoned, 70 years after this horrible tragedy.
For more stories on this you can
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