Willis V. McCall
On July 16, 1949, Norma Padgett, a 17-year-old married white woman in Groveland, Florida, said that she had been raped by four young black men. Police arrested 16-year-old Charles Greenlee, Sam Shepherd, 22; and Walter Irvin, 22, and put them in jail until their trial. Shepherd and Irvin were both US Army veterans. Sheriff McCall had traveled out of Florida at that time but he came back the next day. Newspapers all over the United States wrote about the Groveland case, and they wrote about McCall often.