More than 75 years after four young Black men were wrongly accused in one of Florida’s most notorious racial injustice cases, state lawmakers have approved $4 million in compensation for their descendants as part of the state’s 2026-27 budget.
The funding, included in the final budget agreement reached by legislative leaders, would provide restitution to the families of the Groveland Four — Charles Greenlee, Walter Irvin, Samuel Shepherd and Ernest Thomas — who were falsely accused of raping a 17-year-old white woman in Lake County in 1949.
When Florida issued posthumous pardons in 2019 and a judge vacated the convictions in 2021, it marked the first official acknowledgment that the four men had been innocent victims of a racially charged miscarriage of justice. The compensation is the latest chapter in that effort to provide some measure of accountability…