Politics
After being haunted by decades, Groveland Four families receive $4M from Florida
Aaron Newson never understood why his family avoided Florida.
He was 10 years old the year Disney World first opened. Growing up in New York, he remembered hearing his wrestling idol Rick Flair (infamously) talk about Space Mountain, which made young Newson want to ride the coaster too. He begged his parents to take him.
His family made excuses. To quiet him, they suggested maybe someday they could go to Disneyland in California instead. They were never going to vacation in Florida.
Newson grew up without big family Christmases full of cousins and his extended family. He hardly knew his relatives in Florida. His parents returned only once to Florida, for a funeral.
By the time Newson was a grown man in his 30s and working in law enforcement, he decided to go on a weekend trip to watch the Buffalo Bills play on the road against the Miami Dolphins, his favorite team. The game featured Jim Kelly versus Dan Marino.
“My mother, my grandmother, and my dad did not want me going to Florida. They asked me who I was going with. They wanted to know everything,” Newson recollected. “They made me call every day at a different time to make sure that I was OK.”
Newson noted that he was a corrections officer at the time, yet his family was less worried about his job than they were his trip.
“I deal with criminals every day and you don’t throw a fit about that? I’m going to Florida to enjoy myself at a football game and it’s like I’m going off to war,” he recalled.
“Now, I know. I understand it.”
The family’s fear was part of the trauma that’s haunted the Black families of the Groveland Four for decades, lingering from generation to generation. It was like a black hole consumed the family tree, yet some of the younger generation never knew why. It was too painful for the older family members who lived through it to talk about it.
Newson’s uncle, Ernest Thomas, was shot more than 400 times by an angry mob in Lake County in 1949 after being falsely accused of raping a White teenager.
Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall shot Sam Shepherd and Walter Irvin, claiming they tried to escape when the Sheriff was transporting them to jail. Shepherd died, but Irvin, still handcuffed, survived by playing dead. Irvin was later tried and convicted. He was paroled in 1968 and died a year later.
The fourth man, Charles Greenlee, was convicted and served 12 years in prison before he was paroled. Greenlee later died in 2012.
Seventy-seven years later, the state of Florida is giving their descendants $4 million as compensation. The money made it into the 2026-27 state budget that Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed.
“While no amount of money can erase the pain of the injustice they endured, this $4 million represents a long-overdue acknowledgment of the harm that was done and our responsibility to make it right,” said Sen. LaVon Bracy Davis, who shepherded the efforts through the Legislature this year.
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Newson’s family members were told to leave Lake County and never come back.
“They did not want to subject my brother and sister and myself to Florida,” said Newson, now 65 years old.
So Newson’s family fled. They left behind Lake County and moved to New York. They changed their last name so no one could find them. The family surname, originally spelled Newsome, evolved into Newson by the time Aaron was born in 1961.
“I just wish they had really talked to us about it,” Newson said. “It was like a taboo. … I think that generation, when something happened that was traumatic, they did not talk about it.”
It wasn’t until DeSantis, Florida’s new Governor, was pardoning the Groveland Four that Newson learned the circumstances behind his then-26-year-old uncle’s death. His cousin alerted him about the news.
A pardon? Newson asked, confused. For what? All he knew was that his uncle had been shot and died. Thompson must have done something wrong, Newson always assumed.
Newson didn’t know the Sheriff took justice into his own hands, a Sheriff’s deputy was accused of falsifying the evidence, and the victim never publicly recanted even when the evidence was clear she had lied.
Meanwhile, Newson was a law-and-order man. In a 28-year law enforcement career, he worked as a Sheriff’s jail deputy and then a corrections officer in New York.
He reflected on the miscarriage of justice against his uncle.
“You’re supposed to be innocent until proven guilty,” Newson said. “It was just completely different, backward.”
Some Groveland Four descendants grew up on the straight and narrow, warned to never get into trouble. They became teachers, joined law enforcement, and worked for the government, said Eddie Irvin Jr., the nephew of Walter Irvin, at a 2021 news conference.
The same press conference featured remarks from Greenlee’s daughter, Carol Greenlee, who was only 3 years old when her father went to prison.
“I would not let injustice define me,” she said. “I would not go to prison. I would not be violent. I would not hate, but I would love and embrace all of those who did not know at the time that my father is a caring and loving compassionate person that did not rape anybody.”
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A sad ritual began when relatives gathered together every few weeks. The women sat at the kitchen table, weeping, holding hands to comfort each other. The men stood outside around a barrel, talking. Hushed voices. Tears. Dark family secrets.
“They killed my baby,” Beverly Robinson’s aunt would say.
Little Beverly always wondered: Who were “they”? Why was her family so sad?
“Growing up, we were forbidden to ask about the story,” Robinson said.
Robinson had never met her first cousin, Sam Shepherd, who died before she was born.
The memories of her family mourning around the kitchen table were unforgettable on an impressionable 5-year-old as she grew up and went to college. Robinson vowed to find out what happened. She became a detective of sorts, digging into her family tree.
As a college freshman living in Georgia, she drove alone in her old green Plymouth Duster to Fort Lauderdale where the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was located. Her mother didn’t know she was going. Robinson did not find any lead, but she was determined not to quit.
Robinson read microfilm at the library, pouring over the black-and-white archived newspaper stories.
“I went home from college one weekend and my mother went into her room and she came back with a newspaper so old you couldn’t touch it. She said to me, ‘I see you are determined and interested in the story, So here you go,’” Robinson said.
The article prompted her to read more about the court proceedings. Robinson also returned to Groveland to interview people who witnessed what happened firsthand — the race riots, people running for their lives, and the arrival of Thurgood Marshall, who led the defense for the Groveland Four.
Once Robinson knew the truth, it was almost unbelievable.
“I just could not wrap my mind around it,” Robinson said. “I had to grow to believe it.”
Robinson’s career took her to Florida’s community college system, where she connected with someone who was going to become a powerful ally for justice.
Geraldine Thompson was employed at Valencia College before she ever ran for the Legislature. Robinson and Thompson befriended each other. Thompson, who cared deeply about Central Florida’s African American history, was unfamiliar with the Groveland Four until Robinson told her, Robinson said.
“She said, ‘You know what? I’m going to take this on. We’re going to get them pardoned.’” Robinson said.
Thompson bought 40 copies of Gilbert King’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Devil in the Grove” for lawmakers to read, Robinson said. The book brought public attention to the case.
The Legislature apologized to the Groveland Four in 2017 and DeSantis, a newly elected first-term Governor, delivered on his campaign promise to posthumously pardon the Groveland Four in 2019.
But a pardon means forgiveness, Lake County State Attorney Bill Gladson acknowledged, and the families of Shepherd, Thomas, Irvin and Greenlee wanted their names fully cleared. Only a prosecutor could do that. But first, Gladson needed to find a smoking gun.
“Without any new evidence — true new evidence — you can’t just go back and change something that had been final,” Gladson said. “I work within the confines of the law.”
The first trial was in 1949 in Lake County, and a retrial took place in 1951 in Marion County. Since then, evidence was misplaced and forgotten. Some of the trial transcripts were lost.
Now, Gladson was on the hunt to find the old evidence to reexamine it. Court officials were digging through storage and old archives in two different counties when an old cardboard box was rediscovered.
Inside were Irvin’s old pants, the denim he wore during the alleged rape. The pants had been an important piece of evidence at trial.
A Sheriff’s deputy, who had a history of lying, testified that Irvin’s pants were stained with “smudges.”
Even then, a FBI lab already existed, but Lake County officials chose not to test the pants at the time.
“While the prosecution never did use the word ‘semen’ when discussing the smear, the implication to the jury was obvious,” Gladson wrote in court records. “The jury was left with the improper suggestion that Walter Irvin’s pants contained evidence of the rape for which he was ultimately convicted.”
Gladson tested the jeans and discovered that no semen or human stains appeared on the pants. It was the breakthrough evidence he needed, which fit into the troubling behavior Gladson knew about the Sheriff and prosecutor working against the Groveland Four during the Jim Crow era.
In 2021, Gladson filed a motion to dismiss Thomas and Shepherd’s indictments for the two young men killed before they ever stood trial. Gladson’s motion also sought to vacate the sentences of Greenlee and Irvin, who by then were both deceased.
His motion was scathing to read.
“Even a casual review of the record reveals that these four men were deprived of the fundamental due process rights that are guaranteed to all Americans. Given these facts today, no fair minded prosecutor would even consider filing these charges and no reasonable jury would convict,” Gladson wrote.
“The evidence strongly suggests that the sheriff, the judge, and the prosecutor all but ensured guilty verdicts in this case. These officials, disguised as keepers of the peace and masquerading as ministers of justice, disregarded their oaths, and set in motion a series of events that forever destroyed these men, their families, and a community. I have not witnessed a more complete breakdown of the criminal justice system, nor do I ever expect I will again.”
The family members wept after Lake County Circuit Court Judge Heidi Davis approved Gladson’s motion. One daughter wailed uncontrollably, bowing her head in the courtroom.
Even King was surprised by what happened next.
“Nobody ever mentioned compensation,” King told Florida Politics this week. “It just didn’t come up. I just thought maybe that was something they didn’t even think was even possible.”
Thompson died in 2025, and the lawmaker who won a Special Election to fill the rest of her term was Bracy Davis, who had served as a state Representative from Ocoee.
This year, Bracy Davis sponsored a bill to give $4 million to the families. Her fellow Senators were fully on board after several emotional hearings with Groveland Four family members and civil rights advocates testifying.
Yet the bill died in the House without any hearings.
But in a twist, the $4 million was inserted into the state budget anyway. The House finally agreed to fund it. The final hurdle was escaping DeSantis’ veto pen — which happened in late June as DeSantis signed the budget and indicated that he supported paying the families.
“I do want to thank the leadership in Tallahassee from the House to Senate and the Governor,” Gladson said. “That was a very powerful message they sent.”
King called it “a great moment in Florida government.”
“A lot of states where these kind of injustices happen, they do get swept under the rug. Nobody wants to bring them back up again. Everyone wants to just forget them,” King said.
“I just am really impressed that the state of Florida has taken it to this level to actually compensate the families of the victims of this injustice.”
Newson, who once doubted the state would ever give his family anything, will split $1 million with nine of his family members.
To share the news that the budget was finalized, “I called the Shepherd family first, then I called the Greenlee family and then I called the Irvin family to let them all know,” Newson said. “We’re elated. Everybody is. We’re just so glad it’s over with. It’s been a long fight. It finally happened.”
For Newson, who grew up with that dark hole in his family tree, the silence, the fear, something had changed. The family tree grew more roots because the Groveland Four families are now all connected to each other.
“I have found sisters and brothers that I didn’t know I had,” Newson said. “We’re all a family.”
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