Lake County a perfect fit for Civil Rights Trail
Any political science scholar knows the value of momentum, and the Groveland Four had it.
After years of ignoring local blacks demanding justice, the white establishment finally exonerated the four young AfricanAmericans unjustly accused of raping a white Lake County teen.
“I like to think that when you get into that courtroom, it’s the law applied to the facts without passion or prejudice,” new Gov. Ron DeSantis said Friday before asking for a motion for pardons. “I don’t think there is any way you can look at this case and think that justice was satisfied.
“It was a miscarriage of justice.”
Between longtime bias, fading memories, family shame and years of entrenchment, what really happened by that dark roadside in 1949 may never be known.
Norma Padgett, the 17-year-old wife who told authorities she was raped, spoke publicly about the incident for the first time in nearly 70 years when she declared she is not a liar and repeated her tale of kidnap and rape to the governor and Cabinet sitting as the Clemency Board. She begged them not to pardon the four men.
Padgett, 86, who spoke from her wheelchair, said she hasn’t ever discussed the case because she feared someone would kill her children or grandchildren.
“Y’all just don’t know what kind of horror I been through all these many years,” she said.
In the end, the only thing that mattered was how horrifically the men were treated — beaten, tortured, framed and deprived of their constitutional rights. Consider that the youngest of the Groveland Four, 16-year-old Charles Greenlee, was in jail when Padgett was assaulted and so could not have been part of any attack.
The backbone of the plea for exoneration was the book “Devil in the Grove” by historian and author Gilbert King, who won a Pulitzer Prize for first unearthing documents that hadn’t been made public earlier and conducting hundreds of interviews piecing together the events. King meticulously laid out the miscarriage of justice perpetrated by the late Sheriff Willis McCall, his deputies and his cronies in the courts.
McCall is dead now, and so are the other bad actors in this sickening chapter of civil rights history. A posse blasted one suspect, Ernest Thomas, with more than 100 rounds while he slept under a tree in north Florida, exhausted from fleeing. Later, McCall shot two others — Sam Shepherd fatally. Walter Irvin, who survived being shot by the sheriff on a lonely, remote road, later died of natural causes, as did Charles Greenlee, the youngest of the four.
“Leave it go,” is the advice that always pours in after a column about the Groveland Four, mostly because families on both sides still live in Central Florida.
But burying pain does not eliminate pain. It never did, and it never will. Plenty of people who
live here are ashamed of the grave injustice. Some simply close their lips and pretend it didn’t happen. Others would rather get it out in the open.
The Clemency Board took the smart route: Tear the Band-Aid off the festering sore and give it air. Let it heal naturally. For years, blacks afraid of retribution quietly handed down the details of the incident among themselves, keeping alive the anger and hurt.
“At that point in history, rights under the Constitution were denied,” Lake County Commission Chairwoman Leslie Campione told the clemency board. “All we can do is acknowledge there were terrible injustices and at least bring some comfort to family members.”
Actually, there is one more way Lake County could redeem itself: Apply to become part of the Civil Rights Trail (civilrightstrail.com).
Some of the stops on the Trail, sponsored in part by the Trust for Public Land, are well known, such as the site where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot on the balcony of room 306 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., now the National Civil Rights Museum.
Others are lesser known, such as the Robert Russa Moton High School in Farmville, Va., where two students led a walkout because of poor conditions at the all-black school. The NAACP stepped in to sue on their behalf, and the complaint became part of the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision that ended segregation. That school, too, has become a museum depicting the community’s role in the civil rights struggle.
Lake would be a perfect spot — not to mention Florida’s first — on the Trail, which takes visitors mostly to small venues where grassroots battles resulted in civil rights for blacks.
Visitors could be led to the basement of the historic courthouse to see where the suspects were chained to overhead pipes and beaten. They could see exhibits about the tale of each man’s life to understand the broad-ranging consequences of hate, which included a diaspora of black families from Groveland when their houses were burned by a mob searching for the supposed rapists.
Oh, wait. Such exhibits would involve truth-telling, and the Lake County Historical Museum, which is inside the historic courthouse, has buried the truth when it comes to the Groveland Four.
Its sole acknowledgment of the Groveland Four is a small exhibit hastily slapped together in July after community pressure over the curator’s plans to bring a Confederate statue being booted from the U.S. Capitol to the museum. However, McCall and his jailer were neatly snipped out of the iconic photo of three of the suspects. Nothing to see here! We told you so! Move along, folks!
That attitude is over. No more hiding.
Now that the pardons are official, the county almost has an obligation to these men and their descendants: Tell their story. There are lessons to be learned.