How The "History" Sausage Is Made

This may seem like a small event in the larger scheme of things, but it is an example of how history is made up (or rather, revised) to fit particular narratives. In this case, how a police beating of four black suspects is changed to the suspects having been conclusively innocent all along--and as evidence of the evils of whites and white culture.

    CNN reports: "White woman who wrongfully accused ‘Groveland Four’ of rape in Jim Crow-era South dies at 92." The article begins:

     A White woman who falsely accused four Black men of rape in the Jim Crow-era South in 1949 has died at the age of 92.

    Norma Padgett Upshaw claimed the four men – Ernest Thomas, Samuel Shepherd, Charles Greenlee and Walter Irvin – sexually assaulted her in Groveland, Florida, about 30 miles west of Orlando, when she was 17. The group, who came to be called the “Groveland Four,” became the faces of the case considered one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in Jim Crow-era Florida.

    Padgett Upshaw died of natural causes on July 12 in Taylor County, Georgia, according to records filed at the probate court. The Washington Post was first to report her death. 

It continues:

    There were doubts about Padgett Upshaw’s testimony from the onset, but in the era of Jim Crow, a jury convicted the men without evidence of a crime. Circuit Court Judge Heidi Davis in Lake County, Florida, granted the state’s motion in November 2021 to posthumously dismiss the indictments against Thomas and Shepherd and vacated the convictions of Greenlee and Irvin.

    In 2019, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis issued full posthumous pardons to the Groveland Four.

    “For seventy years, these four men have had their history wrongly written for crimes they did not commit. As I have said before, while that is a long time to wait, it is never too late to do the right thing,” DeSantis said in the statement at the time.

    Padgett Upshaw claimed her car broke down on the night of July 16, 1949, in Groveland, and said the four men stopped and raped her.

    After being arrested, Shepherd, Greenlee and Irvin were tortured until police were able to elicit a confession from two of them. Thomas managed to escape custody and was killed after a manhunt. 

    Greenlee was sentenced to life in prison.

    Shepherd and Irvin received the death penalty. While being transported from county jail for a retrial, the sheriff shot them both and claimed self-defense. Shepherd died at the scene and Irvin survived by playing dead. His sentence was later commuted to life in prison. 

Like the Emmett Till incident (note how the AP since edited out key information about accusations about Till) and the stories that have grown up around the Tulsa Race Riots, there appear to significant problems with this story. In countering or questioning certain of the events, I will be mostly relying on a Wikipedia article about the incident and resulting trials.

    First, the article states that Upshaw "falsely accused" the four black men. It's not clear where this comes from, although it is probably because one of the black men's family started telling the media in 1998, that Upshaw had privately approached them and said that the rape hadn't occurred. However, there is no independent corroboration of this; and, in fact, even as late as a January 2019 clemency hearing, Upshaw appeared and testified that the men had, indeed, raped her. She told the commission: "I'm beggin' y'all not to give them pardon because they done it. Your minds might be made up. I don't know. If you do, y'all going to be just like them, and that's all I got to say, 'cause I know I'm telling the truth. I went to court twice." In short, Upshaw did not officially recant her testimony.

    Also, although the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the initial conviction because the police had literally beaten a confession out of three of the suspects, the coerced confessions had never even been used in the first trial (in which they were nevertheless found guilty) and they were found guilty in a second trial after remand from the Supreme Court. So no jury or court found the accusation by Upshaw to be false or unfounded. The issue, instead, was always about how the police had gone about their interrogation.

    There was inconclusive medical evidence of whether Upshaw has been forcibly raped. The Wikipedia article recounts:

There is uncertainty about whether Padgett was raped. The prosecution did not question Dr. Geoffrey Binneveld, the physician who examined her, on the stand. Judge Truman Futch did not permit the defense to call the doctor as a witness. According to his records, Binneveld could not tell whether she had been raped. He found no evidence of tears or wounds in the vagina other than the lacerations mentioned above [ed: the earlier reference to lacerations had been edited out of the article when I accessed it]. Laboratory analysis of a vaginal smear revealed no spermatozoa present in the vagina, nor any organisms resembling gonococci, which could have been other evidence of sex. There were no other gross signs of bruises, breaks in the skin or other signs of violence.

In other words, the evidence was inconclusive but the lack of certain evidence could have simply been because the victim cleaned herself up, which is common with rape victims. So, while suggestive, it does not establish that Upshaw had falsely accused the men.

    The article next says that "a jury convicted the men without evidence of a crime." Actually two juries convicted the men of the rape. And it certainly was not without evidence. Although the coerced confessions had never been admitted, the victim, Upshaw, testified at both trials. Moreover, although not mentioned in the CNN article, the four men were accused of not just raping Upshaw but also severely beating her husband. Presumably her husband also testified at the trials. Witness testimony is clearly evidence. So CNN is blatantly lying that the men were convicted without evidence. Unless CNN is suggesting that the testimony of white people cannot be considered evidence.... 

    Second, there were footprints at the scene that matched the shoes of one of the suspects, although the suspect claimed he was wearing a different pair of shoes on the night of the crime. So there is physical evidence that links at least one of the suspects to the scene of the crime. The suspect whose shoes matched prints at the scene had said he was drinking with a third suspect the night of the rape, thus tying that third suspect to the crime.Yet another article reports that the suspects "Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin, acknowledged they had stopped by the vehicle to assist but denied the rape."

    Undoubtedly there was more evidence, but that is all these two articles mention.

    In reality, what it comes down to is whether you believe the testimony of a white woman and her husband, and a footprint that puts at least one of the suspects at the scene of the crime over the testimony of the black suspects. The juries at the two trials apparently believed the victims and the physical evidence. 

    Where the four men, or any of them, innocent of the crime? Perhaps. If true, it certainly wouldn't be the first time a woman had falsely accused a man (or men) of rape (e.g., the Duke lacrosse team, or the rape accusations against Brett Kavanaugh). On the other hand, it is not unknown for a gang of young blacks to attack, kidnap, rape, torture and murder a white couple.

    But whatever the case, let us not fool ourselves that these men were eventually exonerated in 2021 because they were innocent of the crimes with which they were charged. They were exonerated because of political expediency and historic revisionism demanded it in an era of "black lives matter". That is, they were exonerated because the police had beaten them, not because they were found to have been innocent of attacking a white couple and raping the wife.