Judge in Lake County clears the Groveland Four, restores ‘the innocence afforded them by the law’
• Family members hugged and sobbed with relief after the hearing.
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• Family members hugged and sobbed with relief after the hearing.
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• A judge in Lake County will hold a hearing today on whether to posthumously clear the names of the Groveland Four. The young Black men were wrongly prosecuted — and two of them were shot to death — following the alleged rape of a 17-year-old white girl in 1949. For some perspective on this case, WMFE’s Joe Byrnes spoke with Gilbert King, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Devil in the Grove” brought the story to national attention again. .
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• In recent years the Legislature issued an apology and the governor pardoned the men posthumously.
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• Some 200 people gathered in front of the old courthouse in Tavares for a ceremony and to see the monument.
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• In the past century, white-owned newspapers across the South published racist material that stirred up mobs, incited lynchings, and even congratulated those who committed them. In this century, some have expressed regret. This January, five days before they were posthumously pardoned by Gov. Ron DeSantis, the Orlando Sentinel ran an apology for its treatment 70 years ago of the Groveland Four, four young black men who were wrongly accused of raping a young white woman in Lake County. Two were murdered, and the other two wrongly imprisoned. An example of the Sentinel’s ongoing inflammatory coverage: a front-page cartoon run just as a grand jury was convening showing four empty electric chairs under the words, “No Compromise!” The paper’s conduct was …
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• The Groveland Four have been pardoned. The nearly 70 year old case where four black men were falsely accused of raping a white woman was discussed by the state’s clemency board Friday.
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• The Groveland Four have become a symbol of racial injustice in the Jim Crow Era. Florida state leaders want to acknowledge the state’s failure with a pardon.
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