It’s now our turn to apologize
Two years ago, the Florida Legislature issued a “heartfelt apology” to the four black men wrongly accused of raping a Lake County woman in 1949. On Friday, the Florida Cabinet pardoned them. Now it’s our turn.
We’re sorry for the Orlando Sentinel’s role in this injustice. We’re sorry that the newspaper at the time did between little and nothing to seek the truth. We’re sorry that our coverage of the event and its aftermath lent credibility to the cover-up and the official, racist narrative.
We’re sorry that reporters and editors failed in our duty to readers, to the community and to the Groveland Four and their families.
The newspaper, then called the Orlando Morning Sentinel, published many stories about the incident and the aftermath.
The official version of the story was that in the pre-dawn hours of July 16, 1949, a white couple’s car broke down on a lonely road near Groveland in Lake County. Four black men drove up and offered to help but then beat Willie Padgett, kidnapped his wife, Norma Padgett and raped her, authorities said at the time.
In the aftermath, the homes of black families were burned and shot at by a mob. Three of the accused men — Samuel Shepherd, Walter Irvin and Charles Greenlee — were quickly arrested while another — Ernest Thomas — was pursued in North Florida by a posse.
Thomas was shot to death about a week later. Shepherd and Irvin were shot several years later by the infamous Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall, who
claimed they tried to escape. Shepherd was killed but Irvin survived and revealed that McCall wanted to assassinate them.
The story had many more ugly twists and turns marked by lies, cover-ups and injustice.
You wouldn’t know it from reading the Orlando Morning Sentinel in the years immediately following the incident.
Instead, the paper inflamed the public several days later, publishing on the front page a cartoon that showed four empty electric chairs and labeled “The Lake County Tragedy” and “The Supreme Penalty.” Above the cartoon, a title read, “No Compromise!” The cartoon ran just as a grand jury was convening. It quickly returned murder indictments against the men.
According to Gilbert King’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Devil in the Grove,” a Morning Sentinel editorial warned that attempts to use “legal technicalities” in defending the men “may bring suffering to many innocent Negroes.”
After a federal grand jury was impaneled in 1950 to consider civil rights violations in case, longtime Lake County reporter Ormund Powers responded with a lengthy article. Powers, who covered the incident from the start, wrote, “The case is closed, but angry and malicious words still come from a radical Northern Negro press and certain Negro writers.”
Powers wrote fondly of McCall, one of the genuine villains in Central Florida’s history. In a November 1951 column, Powers had this to say: “Knowing McCall as long as we have, and watching his face as he testified about the Shepherd-Irvin matter before the coroner’s jury, we have no doubt he was telling the truth when he said the Negroes attacked him and he shot in self defense.”
Many more examples are in the archives, and the coverage had consequences. In a U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning the convictions of Shepherd and Irvin, the Sentinel’s electric chairs cartoon was cited as one of the factors that should have led to a change of venue in the men’s original trial.
The Groveland Four coverage then would not happen today. Reporters and editors at the Sentinel are expected to question official versions of events, not to blindly accept them.
However, that does not excuse us from taking responsibility for past coverage, even if it was nearly 70 years ago.
Gov. Ron DeSantis spoke eloquently about injustice at Friday’s Cabinet meeting. He quoted former Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, who called the case “one of the best examples of one of the worst menaces to American justice.”
Then DeSantis and the Cabinet, in a moving moment, distinguished themselves by giving pardons to the Groveland Four.
Today, we ask the public’s pardon for a period when our coverage fell short.