ORLANDO, Fla. — A $4 million fund negotiated by state lawmakers for relatives of the Groveland Four, the quartet of Lake County Black men falsely accused of raping a white woman in 1949, culminates a long battle to come to terms with a dark moment in Florida history.

The money would go to the families of Walter Irvin, Samuel Shepherd, Charles Greenlee and Ernest Thomas. It was OK'd Sunday as part of the budget package for the coming fiscal year and is slated for a vote Friday.

The Groveland Four case had long been ignored until the 2012 publication of “Devil In The Grove,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning book that brought national attention to that dark period of Lake County’s history.

In 2019, the men were posthumously pardoned and a memorial was unveiled at the historic courthouse in Tavares. It would take another two years before a Lake County judge officially exonerated them.

The men were accused by 17-year-old Norma Padgett of raping her in the backseat of her and her husband’s car on July 16, 1949. She claimed the couple was approached while their car was broken down on a dark stretch of road near Okahumpka, and said her husband Willlie had been beaten and robbed. She stood by her claims to police until her death in Georgia in 2024 at the age of 92.

While authors and historians have suggested the story was fabricated to cover up the couple’s volatile relationship, the white lynch mob that gathered within hours from across Central Florida prompted an exodus of many of Groveland’s Black families, with many never to return. The mob burned and looted Shepherd’s home while attacking surrounding homes and businesses.

That terror and the presence of the Ku Klux Klan, which littered the streets with pamphlets amid the fallout of Padgett’s accusations, prompted the governor to call in the National Guard to quell the violence.

Deputies seeking confessions beat Shepherd and Irvin, both 22, and Greenlee, 16, in the basement of the county jail. Meanwhile, a lynch mob formed by the notorious Lake County lawman, Sheriff Willis McCall, shot Thomas, 26, hundreds of times and killed him in a Panhandle encounter, as Thomas tried to flee the state days after Padgett’s accusations.

Tried by an all-white jury, the three surviving men were convicted based on fabricated evidence and perjured testimony by prosecution witnesses. Irvin and Shepherd got death sentences while Greenlee was sentenced to life.

Attorney Thurgood Marshall appealed Irvin’s and Shepherd’s verdicts before the U.S. Supreme Court, which Marshall would later join himself in 1967.

On April 9, 1951, the court unanimously ruled to overturn the convictions and ordered new trials. But Shepherd would not live long enough to go before the jury.

In November of that year, McCall and Deputy Sheriff James Yates shot Shepherd and Irvin on a dirt road near Umatilla, claiming the handcuffed men were making their escape. Irvin survived his injuries and accused McCall and Yates of attempted murder, but no charges were ever brought.

In 1954, after Irvin was once again convicted and sentenced to death, Gov. LeRoy Collins commuted his sentence and he was then paroled in 1968 by Gov. Claude Kirk. Two years later, however, Irvin was found dead in his car in Lake County, attributed officially to natural causes.

Greenlee, the youngest of the Four, was paroled in 1962 and died at 78 in 2012.

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