How the exoneration of the Groveland Four is linked to a jar of roadside dirt

Hours after the Groveland Four were exonerated last month of raping a 17-yearold white girl in 1949, Beverly Robinson scooped dirt into a jar at the side of a country road in Umatilla where one of the wrongly accused Black men, her cousin Samuel Shepherd, was shot dead 70 years ago.

She said her cousin’s death was a lynching, carried out by notoriously racist Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall. Willis was transporting Shepherd and co-defendant Walter Irvin from the Florida State Prison near Gainesville to Tavares after a 1951 U.S. Supreme Court decision granted them a new trial.

McCall, who alleged the young Black men had tried to escape, also shot Irvin in the neck and chest but the Army veteran somehow survived.

A coroner’s inquest deemed the sheriff ’s actions justified but Irvin’s recovery — and retrial — led ultimately to the extraordinary exoneration Thanksgiving week, said State Attorney Bill Gladson. He argued to clear the names of the Groveland Four posthumously, citing newly discovered evidence.

Gladson said he would not have had a legal basis to introduce the evidence if Irvin had not survived to be convicted in a retrial.

“Absolutely not,” he said. “There would have been no reason to review anything.”

The jar of roadside dirt meanwhile is headed Saturday to the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, where it will be displayed on a wall with 800 other vessels filled with soil from thousands of documented lynching sites across the nation, but predominantly in the post-Civil War South.

Robinson gave a second jar to the Wells’ Built Museum of African American History and Culture in Orlando.

The Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, located about a mile apart in Montgomery — the first capital of the Confederacy and a former slave-trade center — honor the memory of thousands of African-Americans known to have been lynched between 1877 and 1950.

Though Shepherd died in 1951 at age 23, his name is inscribed on a monument

at the memorial, which opened in 2018.

“We were very honored that they selected our Sam,” said Robinson, who also marked the Umatilla site with a wreath.

Robinson said collecting soil from the site where her cousin died was a request made by the Equal Justice Institute, which has dedicated resources to exposing

and fighting racial injustices, both past and present. Robinson said the organization may install a permanent marker at the roadside.

The not-for-profit group, founded by lawyer and “Just Mercy” author Bryan Stevenson, opened the museum and memorial as part of a national effort to create “new spaces, markers, and memorials that address the legacy of slavery, lynching, and racial segregation, which shapes many issues today.”

Among other glass vessels displayed at the museum is a jar of soil from July Perry’s grave at Greenwood Cemetery in Orlando. A Black labor broker and landowner, Perry was lynched by a white mob after the Ocoee Election Day Massacre in 1920.

The night of Nov. 6, 1951, McCall, a feared figure in Lake County where his seven terms as sheriff from 1944-72 were marked by controversy and racial intolerance, drove Shepherd and Irvin along unlit back roads on the way from the state prison for an upcoming hearing on a defense motion.

Shepherd and Irvin, Army buddies and half of the Groveland Four, were handcuffed together in the front seat of the sheriff ’s Oldsmobile 98 when McCall stopped the roomy car about a mile west of Umatilla, a small town south of the Ocala National Forest. He thought a tire was going flat.

Seven months earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court set aside the prisoners’ rape convictions and death sentences and ordered each a new trial.

“These convictions ... do not meet any civilized conception of due process of law,” Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson said, noting the influence of biased press coverage, including the Orlando Sentinel’s. “This case presents one of the best examples of one of the worst menaces to American justice.”

The other half of the Groveland Four — Ernest

Thomas and Charles Greenlee — was not covered by the high court’s decision.

Thomas never made it to any court. He bolted from Groveland the morning after the alleged rape. But a deputized mob with dogs tracked him over 10 days into north Florida to Madison County where he was shot repeatedly — maybe 400 times, according to the Baltimore Afro-American.

Greenlee, 16 when charged with the alleged rape, did not appeal his conviction. He had confessed to the crime after a long and brutal beating by deputies in the jail basement, according to “Devil in the Grove,” author Gilbert King’s Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Groveland Four tragedy.

The all-white jury, which found the Black teen guilty, recommended a sentence of “mercy” and Greenlee got a life term in prison instead.

He was paroled in 1960 and died in 2012.

McCall said he shot Shepherd and Irvin on the roadside

in self-defense because the prisoners had “jumped” him and tried to escape when he stopped to examine the half-flat tire. The sheriff then radioed Deputy James Yates to summon a Umatilla service station attendant to change the tire.

The two Black men were still lying together in a ditch when then-State Attorney Jesse Hunter arrived about an hour after the shooting.

“Apparently Willis thought they were both dead,” Hunter said to reporters the next day.

Irvin was shot through the cheek, in the neck and shoulder.

According to a report from the Nov. 9, 1951, edition of the Orlando Sentinel, Irvin spoke to a governor’s investigator, defense lawyers and reporters from his bed at Waterman Memorial Hospital, saying McCall had ordered he and Shepherd to get out of the Oldsmobile car and fix the tire.

He said the sheriff shot them both “right quick.”

“I heard [the sheriff ] say,

‘I got rid of them; killed the sons of ____,’ “according to the article, which omitted an expletive.

During Irvin’s retrial, prosecutors insinuated that “smears” on the fly of his trousers were semen and evidence of rape, Gladson said.

“The state went really far in the second trial ... talking about those pants a lot more,” he said.

But prosecutors never had the pants scientifically tested for the presence of semen, though they had the ability to do so, Gladson said.

Gladson found the trousers in a box of evidence in the Lake County Clerk of Courts’ possession, and an investigator for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement took them Sept. 9 to the FDLE’s lab in Orlando to be analyzed. The lab reported: “Using microscopy, no semen was identified ...”

That was new evidence.

STATE ARCHIVES OF FLORIDA in 1951, on a roadside near Umatilla, Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin were shot by Lake County Sheriff Willis V. McCall, standing. Shepherd died and Irvin survived though he was shot in the cheek, neck and chest.