PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "A jury deliberated for 90 minutes before returning guilty verdicts, convinced by a prosecutor that the defendants had confessed to the sheriff. Jurors did not see their bruises from beatings in which they were handcuffed to overhead pipes and pummeled with batons, the defendants later told NAACP attorneys. Other exculpatory evidence was kept from the defense, including a medical report from a physician, Geoffrey Binneveld, who examined Ms. Padgett hours after her alleged assault and told FBI investigators that he found “no spermatozoa was present.” Jurors also were not told that Greenlee was in custody for vagrancy 20 miles from the scene of the alleged assault at the time it was said to have occurred. Newspapers highlighted other inconsistencies. The St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) reported in 1950 that Ms. Padgett claimed to be “crying profusely and visibly shaken” when she first encountered the night watchman. But the watchman told the newspaper that she was “extremely calm” and that even though she claimed to have been held captive, she said the men had “not harmed her.” Moreover, she told him, according to the paper, that “she had not seen her captors clearly enough to be able to identify them.”
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STORY: "Norma Padgett, accuser of exonerated ‘Groveland Four,’ dies at 92," by Reporter Tim Johnson, published by The Washington Post, on July 31, 2024.
SUB-HEADING: "Her claim of rape against four Black men in 1949 precipitated what is now recognized as a grotesque miscarriage of justice in the Jim Crow South."
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PHOTO CAPTION: "Sheriff Willis V. McCall, far left, and an unidentified man stand next to three of the accused “Groveland Four”: Walter Irvin, Samuel Shepherd and Charles Greenlee in Lake County, Fla."
PHOTO CAPTION: "Norma Padgett, the accuser of the Groveland Four, is surrounded by her sons as she pleads with a clemency board not to pardon the Groveland Four during a hearing at the Florida Capitol in 2019."
GIST: "In the predawn hours of July 16, 1949, a young White couple — Norma Lee Padgett and her husband, Willie — were driving along a desolate road in central Florida after a night of whiskey drinking and dancing at the local American Legion hall.
They were near the rural crossroads of Okahumpka, on the way to get a bite to eat, when their Ford stalled. After no one else stopped to assist them, two Black men in a sedan rolled up and asked if the couple needed help. The Padgetts later said a fight broke out that left Willie Padgett lying in a ditch. What ignited the fight, and whether it even took place, has not been conclusively established.
At daybreak, after walking several miles, 17-year-old Ms. Padgett appeared 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 authorities that the Black men — who she said were four in number — had beaten her husband, then drove her away in their car at gunpoint and took turns raping her in the back seat before releasing her.
Ms. Padgett, whose accusation precipitated what is now recognized as a grotesque miscarriage of justice in the Jim Crow South, died July 12 at 92.
The Washington Post obtained a copy of her death certificate from the vital records office of the probate court in Taylor County, Ga.
According to the death certificate, she died at her home in Butler, Ga. No cause of death was listed. Efforts to reach members of Ms. Padgett’s family were unsuccessful or were declined.
It would take seven decades for the state of Florida to offer a posthumous pardon and then exonerate the men — long known by advocates as the Groveland Four — who were picked up by local deputies under a segregationist sheriff known for his brutal approach to law enforcement.
Ms. Padgett refused to publicly recant her story. “I’m not no liar,” she insisted, at age 86, before a clemency board in 2019. “They done it.”
But after two books — one in 2003 and another in 2012 — examined the case and a mountain of long-suppressed evidence against her claim emerged, credence in Ms. Padgett’s allegation dissolved.
It was replaced by the horror that her charge had left two Black men gunned down — Ernest Thomas was killed in 1949 and Samuel Shepherd in 1951 — and sent two others to prison, Charles Greenlee for 12 years and Walter Irvin for 18½ years.
Irvin was nearly sent to the electric chair in 1954.
The case continues to resonate across the South and beyond, as ever more stories have emerged of concocted evidence, coerced confessions and abuses of the law to enforce Jim Crow-era white domination, said Gilbert King, author of “Devil in the Grove,” which won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and heightened interest in the case.
“There are a lot of Black families that have been gaslighted,” King said in an interview. “They know what the truth is. They know these stories are out there, and they never get anywhere. There’s no judicial relief.”
In the case of the Groveland Four, King noted, the FBI conducted its own investigation parallel to the sham prosecution in Lake County, and King obtained unredacted FBI files during his research. “They put together a story that was undeniable, in my estimation,” King said.
The maelstrom let loose by Ms. Padgett unfolded in a 20-mile radius around her hometown in Lake County, a citrus-growing region west of Orlando where White farmers, backed by the muscle of the Ku Klux Klan, relied on low-paid Black workers to tend to the orange trees.
It was in that area that Norma Lee Tyson was born on March 10, 1932, the date recorded on her Florida driver’s license. She grew up in Bay Lake, a place southeast of Groveland that was described in a news account as a community of wooden farm shacks. According to her death certificate, she obtained an eighth-grade education and worked in fruit processing.
She was six months into an already turbulent marriage to Willie Padgett and was separated from him, living back on her family farm, when they met for a night of partying in the hope of reconciliation. The source of their marital trouble was never made public, but Willie Padgett, in his early 20s at the time, was rumored to have a violent temper, King wrote in “Devil in the Grove.”
Within hours of hearing Ms. Padgett’s allegations, deputies under Lake County Sheriff Willis V. McCall had rounded up Irvin and Shepherd, both 22-year-old Army veterans of World War II, who were sleeping in a car and identified by Ms. Padgett as culprits.
They also took custody of Greenlee, a 16-year-old in possession of an unloaded pistol who was initially charged with vagrancy at a gas station. When Ms. Padgett implicated Greenlee, the accusation triggered a manhunt for Thomas, a friend of his.
McCall led a deputized mob of more than 1,000 men with bloodhounds on a 30-hour hunt for Thomas, 26, who had fled through a cypress swamp in Madison County near the Georgia border. McCall told reporters that Thomas had been “belligerent as the devil” before he was killed in a fusillade of bullets, and the killing was ruled a justifiable homicide.
Meanwhile, White Groveland residents, including Ms. Padgett’s father, stormed the Black areas of the town, discharging weapons and setting homes afire. Florida’s governor called in the National Guard for six days.
When the rape trial opened before an all-White jury at the Lake County courthouse, Ms. Padgett — dressed in her best Sunday clothes — repeatedly used a racial epithet to identify the three defendants in the packed courtroom: Irvin, Shepherd and Greenlee.
A jury deliberated for 90 minutes before returning guilty verdicts, convinced by a prosecutor that the defendants had confessed to the sheriff. Jurors did not see their bruises from beatings in which they were handcuffed to overhead pipes and pummeled with batons, the defendants later told NAACP attorneys.
Other exculpatory evidence was kept from the defense, including a medical report from a physician, Geoffrey Binneveld, who examined Ms. Padgett hours after her alleged assault and told FBI investigators that he found “no spermatozoa was present.”
Jurors also were not told that Greenlee was in custody for vagrancy 20 miles from the scene of the alleged assault at the time it was said to have occurred.
Newspapers highlighted other inconsistencies. The St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) reported in 1950 that Ms. Padgett claimed to be “crying profusely and visibly shaken” when she first encountered the night watchman.
But the watchman told the newspaper that she was “extremely calm” and that even though she claimed to have been held captive, she said the men had “not harmed her.” Moreover, she told him, according to the paper, that “she had not seen her captors clearly enough to be able to identify them.”
The case drew the attention of a rising NAACP lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, who in 1951 appealed the death penalty verdicts for Irvin and Shepherd to the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court, where Marshall would years later sit as the first Black justice, unanimously overturned the verdicts.
“This case presents one of the best examples of one of the worst menaces to American justice,” Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote in the majority opinion, noting the racial bias of the jury and inflammatory media accounts that assumed the men’s guilt.
As a minor, Greenlee had been given a life prison sentence, not the death penalty, and did not appeal his case, after his lawyers told him a new jury might be less sympathetic and order his execution. He was paroled in 1962 after 12 years in prison.
A retrial was ordered for Irvin and Shepherd. While driving them from the Florida State Prison in Raiford to the Lake County jail for retrial in late 1951, McCall pulled off a back road and shot both prisoners.
Shepherd died, while Irvin survived by playing dead. The sheriff claimed the handcuffed prisoners tried to attack him when he stopped to check a tire.
“He made Bull Connor look like Barney Fife,” King later told the New York Times, referring to the brutal commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, Ala., during the civil rights era and the dimwitted deputy sheriff on “The Andy Griffith Show.” “Connor used dogs and fire hoses. McCall actually killed people.”
Three years later, after Irvin was retried and again found guilty, he narrowly escaped execution in the electric chair and his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
He was paroled in 1968 and found dead in his car a year later when he returned to Groveland for a funeral.
The Padgetts remained married through the trial and retrial of the rape case, but Willie Padgett tangled with the law on several occasions, spending jail time for felony sexual assault, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, fraud and vehicle theft, according to a 2017 article in the Atlantic by King.
The Padgetts divorced in 1958. Ms. Padgett dwelled in the Groveland area for nearly half a century, maintaining a public silence about the alleged attack.
She eventually moved to a mobile home at the end of a dirt road near Butler and used the surname of her second husband, Thermon Upshaw, who worked as a heavy equipment operator.
A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.
She came forth to defend her original story on Jan. 11, 2019, as Florida’s Board of Executive Clemency considered a posthumous pardon for the Groveland Four.
“I’m the victim of that night,” she said from a wheelchair, her short white hair combed back over her head, her voice trembling. “Y’all just don’t know what kind of horror I’ve been through for all these many years. … I’m beggin’ y’all not to give them pardon because they done it. … And that’s all I got to say, ’cause I know I’m telling the truth.”
But lawyers for the state reached the opposite conclusion
. Further evidence had come to light from unredacted FBI files, internal documents from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and a new interview with a descendant of a key protagonist.
That descendant was the grandson of Jesse Hunter, the state attorney who prosecuted the case. Broward Hunter found letters in his grandfather’s dusty law office that he said showed neither his grandfather nor the judge believed a rape had ever occurred.
Moreover, Broward Hunter said the letters indicated McCall “was involved” in local gambling operations and rounded up defendants Thomas and Greenlee because he believed they worked for a competitor and “he was eliminating competition,” according to a partial transcript of an interview with Broward Hunter included in the state’s legal motion in October 2021 to have the guilty verdicts of the Groveland Four cases set aside.
“I have not witnessed a more complete breakdown of the criminal justice system,” wrote William Gladson, a state attorney and the author of that motion.
An exoneration of the four Black men was granted a month later"
The entire story can be read at:
