Justice for the Groveland Four • Florida Phoenix

Florida has a budget.

Finally.

It is not, however, a thing of beauty.

There’s $725,000 for an “education” company connected to former Florida Man and current ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee for materials preaching anti-communism.

Propaganda, in other words. This outfit also produces lessons called “The Kids’ Guide to How the Bible Built America.”

There’s $78 million for projects that will likely enrich big campaign donors’ businesses, including shiny new sports facilities, road-widenings and ramp-construction, high tech police equipment and AI “interview” platforms so state agencies won’t have to actually speak to job applicants.

You, ordinary citizen, get a three-year tax break on tickets to the Miami Open Tennis Tournament, and a four-month tax break on gun silencers.

I know you’re excited.

Farmers and ranchers certainly are: The Legislature has earmarked $425 million for them to not develop their land.

But there’s no money for Florida Forever, even though a mere three years ago legislators committed to spending $100 million on conservation lands.

By now, Floridians are all too familiar with our Legislature’s misplaced priorities, posturing, point-scoring, hissy fit-pitching, and fiscal profligacy.

So, it may come as a surprise to hear they’ve actually done something good.

Really good.

At almost the last possible minute, the House and Senate agreed to appropriate $4 million to compensate the families of the four young Black men known as the Groveland Boys, victims of historic racial injustice.

On July 16, 1949, 17-year-old Norma Padgett and her husband Willie claimed they were waylaid on a deserted Lake County road by Walter Irvin, Charles Greenlee, Samuel Shepherd, and Ernest Thomas. The Padgetts accused the four of roughing up Willie and taking turns raping Norma.

Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall was soon in hot pursuit, accompanied by a large posse of white men.

Farce

Thomas initially escaped to Madison County, but the mob caught up with him and shot him 400 times.

Irvin, Shepherd, and Greenlee were arrested and chained to pipes in the county jail where officers beat and tortured them, trying to force them to confess.

They proclaimed their innocence.

Meanwhile, a white mob burned Black-owned houses and businesses.

The trial was a farce, the verdict a foregone conclusion.

In Jim Crow Florida, Black men accused of raping a white woman were almost always convicted — if they weren’t lynched first.

Greenlee, who was 16 at the time, got life in prison. Irvin and Shepherd got the death penalty.

Their lawyers, one of whom was future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, appealed to the high court and got them a new trial in 1951.

Willis McCall was not going to take that from a bunch of radicals in Washington. While Irvin and Shepherd were in his custody, he shot them both, claiming they tried to run away.

Shepherd died; Irvin survived by playing dead.

Lying in a pool of blood, Irvin said he heard McCall on police radio, boasting he’d “got rid” of them.

Irvin was re-tried, convicted by an all-white jury, and once again sentenced to death.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Devil in the Grove, Gilbert King reports Grovelanders who knew Norma and Willie Padgett doubted their story from the beginning. She was estranged from Willie at the time: He was notoriously abusive.

Many thought the Padgetts concocted the rape story to cover up the fact that he was brutalizing her.

Medical evidence indicating she was not raped was never presented at the trial.

His finest hour

Gov. LeRoy Collins, who thought the whole thing stunk to high heaven, commuted Irvin’s death sentence in 1955. He was paroled in 1968 and died the next year.

Greenlee was paroled in 1960 and died in 2012.

King, as well as surviving family members of the Four, worked for years to prove they were innocent.

Then-Gov. Rick Scott refused to trouble himself with the case. But just days after his first inauguration, Ron DeSantis spoke of the 70-year-old miscarriage of justice and pardoned them.

That might go down in history as his finest hour.

The Groveland Boys are all dead now. They’ll never get justice.

But their families, who’ve long lived with the legacy of state violence and institutionalized racism, get to split that $4 million.

Now, lest you think that’s an awful lot of taxpayer dollars, the total budget is about $115 billion.

And, to put it mildly, the money is not always well spent.

“Alligator Alcatraz” may be in the process of shutting down, but that environmental and human rights atrocity costs us more than $1 million per day.

The federal government has finally paid for some operational costs, but there will be no reimbursement for the structures.

You, dear Florida taxpayer, get to make up the difference.

As if that weren’t bad enough, the place is poisonous, its vast number of diesel generators and diesel-powered lighting towers vomiting hundreds of tons of carbon monoxide and nitrous oxides into the atmosphere.

The Center for Biological Diversity just filed a new environmental lawsuit, asking judges to fine Florida $120K per violation per day.

If they succeed, it’ll cost the state a pretty penny.

But then, we’re constantly budgeting for absurd legal actions that do not benefit Floridians in any way, shape, or form.

‘Principle’ at stake

For example, there’s $675,000 for Cooper & Kirk PLLC of Washington D.C., so the law firm can continue fighting a lawsuit from 2021.

When some social media platforms banned Donald Trump and other politicians given to overtly racist, fascist, and flat-out lying posts, the state reared up on its hind legs to protect their right to gaslight the world, never mind the First Amendment’s protections against government-compelled speech.

Given that X and Facebook no longer check facts or restrict vile speech, you’d think this was moot.

I guess the state thinks there’s a “principle” at stake.

Plus, you don’t want to stand between the state under its current management and anything that enables hatred.

And how about the $123 million to other private law firms to pursue (or settle) suits over the state’s denying public records to the public, flying asylum seekers to Martha’s Vineyard, and making other end-runs around the Florida Constitution?

We have little reason to be proud of our lawmakers. They spent so much time posturing and feuding during the 2026 regular session, they had to call a special session to deal with the budget.

Now they’re in Tallahassee for another one, this time to fight about the governor’s proposal to gut local services by ending most taxes on homesteaded property.

Special sessions are estimated to cost anywhere between 30 and 50 grand a day.

And you wonder why Florida can’t have nice things.

Nevertheless, the state’s small, but significant, gesture to the Groveland Boys and their families is a positive step in a state that struggles to confront our past.

Maybe there’s hope for us yet.