Local activist led campaign to exonerate Groveland 4

The Groveland Four case was a long lingering insult to justice, a perverse tangle of specious evidence, racist terror, mendacious testimony, jailhouse torture, coerced confessions, extrajudicial executions and wrongful convictions that disinterested Florida politicians had allowed to fester for 70 years.

No more. In their first week in office, Gov. Ron DeSantis and the newly installed Florida Cabinet issued posthumous pardons for the four black men ensnared in the 1949 case of alleged rape in rural Lake County. Back when Florida was as tainted with Jim Crow justice as any state in the old Confederacy.

If the belated pardons for Ernest Thomas, Charles Greenlee, Walter Irvin and Samuel Shepherd dispelled our collective shame, perhaps we should thank Josh Venkataraman.

Already known around Fort Lauderdale for his community service, Venkataraman,

25, launched the petition on Change.org demanding belated justice for the Groveland Four. He made trips to Groveland. He talked to the Four’s relatives. Lobbied legislators. He did as much as anyone to keep the Groveland Four from fading from memory.

I doubt anyone hereabouts was surprised that Venkataraman was behind the campaign. The St. Thomas Aquinas High School grad was awarded a Silver Knight award in 2012 based on his “tireless” community service. (He also enjoyed a brief burst of fame when Page Six TV featured him on Celebrity Lost Loves as Ariana Grande's eighth-grade boyfriend. (Both were cast members of the Florida Children’s Theater.)

Still, a decades-old criminal case would seem an unexpected pursuit for a college senior who grew up in a sprawling metropolitan area 234 miles south of sleepy little Groveland.

Venkataraman told me it began in 2015. The college senior was driving back to the University of Florida when he passed a freeway exit sign for Groveland that jogged his memory. Months earlier, for a class assignment, he had read Gilbert King’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Devil in the Grove,” which told, in horrific detail, the story of the Groveland Four case and the legal struggle to save the defendants.

King recounted allegations raised by a

17-year-old white girl that four young black men had raped her on a rural road outside Groveland. From there, the case unfolded like a cliché-ridden movie set in the Old South, with infamously racist Sheriff Willis V. McCall plucked straight from central casting. McCall’s deputies quickly arrested three young black “suspects.” A fourth, Ernest Thomas, was tracked down by a posse with baying bloodhounds. The unarmed Thomas was shot dead.

Meanwhile, a mob of angry white crackers rampaged through Groveland’s black neighborhood, shooting into buildings, burning three homes. (Fortunately, most black residents had already fled Groveland. They stayed away until the National Guard restored order.)

The trial of the three survivors before an all-white jury was a study in Jim Crow justice. Prosecutors withheld medical evidence indicating the girl had not been raped. Or that Charles Greenlee had been detained that night by security guards at a store 19 miles from the crime scene. Or that confessions had been beaten out of the accused in the jailhouse basement.

Conviction was a foregone conclusion. Irvin and Shepherd, both World War II vets, received the death penalty. Greenlee, just 16, got a life sentence. The Florida Supreme Court shrugged off the trial’s anomalies, but not the U.S. Supreme Court. A new trial was ordered for Irvin and Shepherd. Seven months later, Sheriff McCall claimed that, as he drove his two shackled prisoners to the courthouse, they tried to escape. He shot them both. Shepherd died. Irvin survived and was retried before another all-white jury. And given another death sentence.

Gov. Leroy Collins later commuted Irvin’s sentence to life in prison. Both Greenlee and Irvin were paroled in the

1960s. (Irvin died just a year after his release. Greenlee lived until 2012.)

Remembering the Groveland Four was left to their families and historians. Until Venkataraman went to work. By 2017, he and a few allies had convinced the Legislature to pass a resolution concluding that the Groveland Four had suffered “a gross injustice.” The way was clear for a pardon. Except Gov. Rick Scott did nothing. His successor was not so timid.

Lately, Venkataraman, now working for a New York marketing firm, has been thinking about reminding his hometown about another racist murder, the 1935 lynching of Reuben Stacey. He talked about campaigning for a monument to commemorate Fort Lauderdale’s own descent into Jim Crow justice. I wouldn’t bet against him.

Fred Grimm (@grimm_fred or leogrimm@gmail.com), a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976.