(CNN) — Four black men are now officially free nearly 70 years after they were wrongly accused of raping a 17-year-old white girl. In 1949, Charles Greenlee, Walter Irvin, Samuel Shepherd and Ernest Thomas were accused of sexually assaulting Norma Padgett in Groveland, Florida, about 30 miles west of Orlando. The group came to be called the “Groveland Four.” There were doubts about Padgett’s testimony from the onset, but in the era of Jim Crow, a jury convicted the men […]
