Lake County, which earned notoriety for the Groveland Four, should erect a permanent memorial on the grounds of its historic courthouse to recognize the injustices endured by the quartet falsely accused of raping a white teen in 1949, County Commission Chairwoman Leslie Campione said.
Campione, who two weeks ago appealed to the Florida Clemency Board before that body voted to posthumously pardon the men, said she will ask fellow commissioners on Tuesday to back her proposal for a historical monument recounting the Jim Crow-era tragedy.
“I feel it’s the right thing to do,” said Campione, who hopes to make the point Lake County is a better more accepting and diverse place today than decades ago.
The Groveland Four — Walter Irvin, Samuel Shepherd, Charles Greenlee and Ernest Thomas — are dead.
Surviving relatives said they were intrigued by Campione’s proposal but want more details before giving their blessing to the idea of forging the story in bronze at the brick building in which three of the four were jailed, beaten and convicted.
“That’s heavy,” said Carol Greenlee, 69, daughter of Charles Greenlee. “But the devil’s in the details. We want to move forward not stay in the past. My father always said, ‘You can’t go forward if you’re always looking behind you.’”
Aaron Newson, nephew of Ernest Thomas, said he was more focused on exonerating the four — an effort that goes beyond forgiving their alleged crime to declaring them innocent based on evidence, including FBI reports uncovered decades later.
His uncle was never convicted, fleeing Lake County as a white mob descended on the Groveland area with anger and guns after the report of rape by Norma Padgett, a white 17-year-old whose story lacked corroborating evidence.
Thomas was killed in July 1949 by a deputized posse that tracked him into a wooded area in Madison County, 180 miles north.
Padgett testified in two trials more than half a century ago that she and her first husband, Willie Padgett, were in a broken-down car near the Lake County crossroads of Okahumpka, north of Groveland, when the four attacked him, then kidnapped and raped her.
The only corroborating physical evidence was later determined to have been manufactured by sheriff’s deputies.
Prosecutors also never disclosed to defense lawyers that the alleged victim had been examined by a doctor who found no evidence of the sexual assault she alleged.
But Padgett, now 86, opposed the pardons and appeared at the clemency board in a wheelchair flanked by her sons.
“I’m beggin’ y’all not to give them pardon because they done it,” she told the board, which is made up of Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Cabinet.
The Lake County case has been thoroughly explored in two books, “Legal Lynching: The Sad Saga of the Groveland Four,” by Gary Corsair, published in 2004, and Gilbert King’s “Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America,” which won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.
Campione said she began thinking of a Groveland Four marker on her drive home from the clemency hearing in Tallahassee.
“Acknowledging injustice and abuse of power that occurred in the past is an important part of letting our whole community know we value American ideals of justice, equal treatment under the law and individual rights guaranteed by our Constitution…,” she said.
She said elected commissioners — not the independent board of the Lake County Historical Museum — should take the lead in crafting a Groveland Four memorial to underscore its importance to the county.
The Lake County Historical Museum, which occupies the first floor of the historic courthouse on West Main Street in Tavares, was assailed last year by a coalition of mostly black community leaders during a fiery debate over curator Bob Grenier’s decision to set aside museum space for the 9-foot-tall bronze statue of Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith, the last confederate leader to surrender.
A critic blasted the museum’s acknowledgment of the Groveland Four episode in a kiosk as “pathetic.” Others pointed out it doesn’t mention notoriously racist Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall, who shot and killed Shepherd and critically wounded Irvin while transporting both from state prison to Tavares for a U.S. Supreme Court-mandated retrial.
Pastor Michael Watkins, who organized the coalition’s protests, favors a permanent memorial for the Groveland Four but remains firmly opposed to bringing the Confederate statue to the Tavares museum.
The coalition also persuaded elected leaders in Clermont, Eustis, Groveland, Leesburg, Mount Dora and Tavares to pass resolutions opposed to installing the Confederate general’s statue in a public building maintained by taxpayers.
Undaunted, museum officials installed a bust of Alexander Darnes, who was born into slavery in 1840 in the St. Augustine home of the general’s father, Joseph Lee Smith.
An information placard in the protective case shielding Darnes’ bust points out that he would become Florida’s second black doctor.
It also credits the general’s great-granddaughter for loaning the sculpture to the museum and notes: “Dr. Darnes’ fascinating story will be told as part of the new exhibit featuring the Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith statue…”
Watkins said a Groveland Four monument would be a step forward but the general’s statue would be two steps back.
“If it comes here, Lake County is telling you what it believes and where we as African-Americans stand,” he said.
Campione, the commission’s liaison to the museum board, disagreed and said she supports the museum’s acquisition of the statue, which has been displayed since 1922 at the National Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol as one of two figures representing Florida.
The other statue depicts John Gorrie, considered the father of air-conditioning. The general will be removed from the Capitol in 2020, replaced by African-America educator and civil-rights advocate Mary Jane McLeod Bethune.
Campione said the statue is a Civil War artifact worth preserving “for posterity sake and to do so is not unkind and definitely is not racist…”
She said the statue should be placed in proper context with information about the war, its origins and impact, and the lingering debate over whether the statue belongs in Lake County, to which the slave-holding general had no apparent ties.
shudak@orlandosentinel.com or 407-650-6361.