Groveland Four bill is ready for the Senate floor after final Committee vote

A bill to give $4 million to the Groveland Four’s descendants cleared its final Senate Committee and is heading to the Senate floor.

The bill gained momentum after Sen. LaVon Bracy Davis filed the legislation, with several influential Republican Senators signing up to co-introduce the bill.

After a one-hour discussion, the Senate Appropriations Committee OK’d SB 694, which was amended to appropriate $4 million in total, or $1 million going to each of the four families. Previously, the amount of money had been left unspecified. 

Thursday’s hearing featured more emotional pleas from Black advocates, religious leaders and the Groveland Four family members for the state to compensate the families.

In 1949, a 17-year-old White female accused four young Black men of rape in Lake County.

“Despite the lack of physical evidence and the corroborated alibis, Charles Greenlee, Walter Irvin, Samuel Shepherd and Ernest Thomas were presumed guilty from the start,” said Bracy Davis, an Ocoee Democrat. “Charles Greenlee, just 16 years old, Samuel Shepherd, and Walter Irvin were beaten. Confessions were coerced. Ernest Thomas was hunted down by a mob of 1,000 men and shot more than 400 times.”

The elected county Sheriff also fired on Shepard, killing him, and Irvin, who survived, while transporting them to jail.

“All of this happened because of a lie,” Bracy Davis said.

The restorative justice began in 2017 when the Legislature issued a formal apology. Gov. Ron DeSantis posthumously pardoned the Groveland Four in 2019. The courts vacated their sentences, fully exonerating the Groveland Four in 2021.

“SB 694 represents the final step,” Bracy Davis said, explaining that the young men’s families never received any compensation from the atrocities.

The families of the Groveland Four are aging. Irvin’s only living sibling, his brother, is turning 90 years old, said his daughter, Angelia Irvin McKinnon.

“I’m standing today mainly for my father, who has had a childhood that no one would ever want to experience,” she said. “Imagine it being your child, your mother, your father who has waited over 70 years to get justice. I want you to visualize that. What would it have been like if it was your child?”

LaVon Wright Bracy, the Senator’s mother and a Civil Rights leader who was the first Black student to graduate from Gainesville High School, said the story of Groveland Four was deeper than just about four men. 

“It’s about systems that fail to value Black lives equally and about families who have carried consequences for failure for generations,” she said as she argued that compensating the family was “not charity,” but accountability. 

Sen. Darryl Rouson, a St. Petersburg Democrat, compared the bill to past legislation for the Dozier victims or the Ocoee massacre victims. 

“In your first Senate Session, you bring a bill of this magnitude and impact to the Senate floor,” Rouson told Bracy Davis. “I want to congratulate you on your work and I want to thank all those who came and testified this morning, particularly the family members.”