After a night of serious drinking at an American Legion hall dance in Lake County, Florida, one mid-summer evening in 1949, a 17-year-old girl named Norma Lee (Tyson) Padgett and her estranged husband, Willie Padgett, reported that they had been the victims of a violent attack by a group of young Black men. The young woman claimed she had been raped, though physical evidence did not support her claim.