Still Haunted by Shackles of the Past

CHICAGO —  Even now, when friends introduce Delbert Tibbs, they say his name, then in the same breath feel compelled to mention where he lived 25 years ago:

On Death Row. Fighting to stay out of the electric chair.

Those desperate years when Tibbs loudly proclaimed his innocence all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court were the reason he became a celebrity long ago. Now, decades later, they may be the reason he drifts from job to job, surviving, but not thriving in the way he once dreamed.

“The personal demons that I struggle with now--I’m sure that in some sense they come from that experience,” he says. “But,” he adds, his voice rising, “how do you know?”

Tibbs, now 61, lives alone in a one-room apartment in a gritty neighborhood. He has a wide circle of friends and admirers, but none of the accouterments that come with financial stability: no car, no insurance policy, no nest egg--and for the moment, no permanent job.

“Delbert either doesn’t want to or can’t function in the dog-eat-dog, mainstream rat race the rest of us live in,” says Jennifer Bishop, a friend.

So Tibbs scrapes by, writes poetry and campaigns actively against the death penalty (he has spoken on three continents). But while friends still bring up his past in social situations--something that embarrasses him--he doesn’t dwell on it.

“If you get hit by a car, every day that’s not the predominant thought in your head,” he says. “I don’t think about it a lot.”

A generation ago, it was a different story.

That’s when Tibbs was sentenced to die for murder and rape in Florida. His conviction was overturned and he was freed on appeal in 1977. The charges were eventually dropped. But his impassioned campaign to prove his innocence turned him into a cause celebre.

Pete Seeger, the folk singer, wrote a ballad about him. Angela Davis, the ‘60s radical, raised money for him. A defense committee championed his cause, casting him as a black man victimized by a racist white justice system.

People told Tibbs he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. No, he says, he was the wrong kind of black man--one who was a little full of himself, who looked white people in the eye, who had grand dreams of becoming a writer.

“A braggadocios young black man,” he says, slowly enunciating each word.

Tibbs, the poet, fancies words, the bigger the better. His conversations are like flipping through the pages of Bartlett’s--chock-full with quotes, from Thoreau to Kerouac, Jesus to the Dalai Lama.

Tibbs, the former theology student, can do a riff on everything from Krishna, the Hindu god, to the Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism.

His own belief is that “there is a just judge” and that divine powers rescued him when he got in trouble.

It was in 1974 when a 16-year-old white hitchhiker was raped and her male companion shot to death in an isolated field near Fort Myers, Fla.

Tibbs, a Chicagoan in Florida doing farm work, was arrested. It was his first brush with the law. His defense presented evidence he was 225 miles away the day before and after the crime. No physical evidence linked him to the scene.

But the rape victim identified him in dramatic testimony, though she had been high on marijuana the day of the crime.

An all-white jury found Tibbs guilty and he was sentenced to die. But he never doubted that one day he’d walk free.

“I always knew that I was innocent and I knew that I shouldn’t be there,” he says. “I always insisted in my own mind and heart that I was going to get off.”

Two years later, the Florida Supreme Court ordered a new trial, citing doubts about the rape victim’s credibility. The case was appealed up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1982, eight years after the crime, the county state’s attorney dropped the charges, saying the rape victim was too unreliable. Tibbs says he knows some people still believe he’s guilty, but he has one critical supporter: The prosecutor in his case has since said he has no doubt that he is innocent.

Once his legal troubles were over, Tibbs quickly realized time lost could not be regained and some things would never be the same.

He had missed precious years with his 7-year-old son. Divorced when he was arrested, Tibbs never remarried, though he now has three children and two grandchildren. He took his youngest, a 14-year-old daughter, on a pilgrimage to his native Mississippi a few years ago.

Tibbs also had a resume that was forever scarred, and even the most well-intentioned employer might have questions about his story. How, he asks, do you explain all the legal twists and turns of his case in a few lines on a job application?

The answer was, you don’t. So he abandoned the want ads, and turned to friends for help in finding work.

He recently worked at Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, where he screened letters for inmates who claimed to be innocent--people much like himself years ago.

But he had trouble doing computer work, and left after a month.

He now has a temporary job at a government warehouse.

Over the decades, Tibbs has also been a car wash manager, school security guard, youth counselor and a social worker--a job he quit because it was too traumatic to enter the county jail.

“Those iron doors have a sound probably like nothing you’ve ever heard,” he says. “I used to tell myself you have a badge with your photo on it, you’re all good, Delbert, you’re cool. But some part of my mind knew that I was back in jail.”

At other times, Tibbs’ problem has been getting in the door. Once, when a priest recommended him for a job, he couldn’t get the man doing the hiring to return his calls.

Tibbs leans his 6-foot-3 frame back in his chair, lifts his baseball cap to scratch his head and in his smoky baritone, explains how he coped with that rejection:

“How can I say this without sounding vainglorious? If I were not a steadfast and intrepid sort of fellow, I would have been bowled over. But I refused to give in.”

No, Tibbs says, he has never been agitated by adversity, never been one to pace, not even when he was behind bars.

He likes to tell a story about a British Army lieutenant cut off from his troops in a no man’s land, then discovered three days later by his comrades, sitting calmly in his foxhole, reading Sophocles.

“That’s Delbert,” he says with a contented grin.

But Tibbs also concedes that, yes, he would have more money and more status if not for prison and the years he fought to stay free.

“Sometimes, I tell myself, ‘Wow, if they hadn’t done this, I could have been a best-selling author. . . . I could have traveled all over the world.’ But you know, in reality, life isn’t like that. Who knows what might have happened to me? . . . I’m not much of a what-if guy.”

But his friend, Jennifer Bishop, head of a national advocacy group for families of murder victims, can’t help but wonder how Tibbs’ ordeal changed him.

“He’s a very healthy person in his soul, in his heart and his mind,” she says. “But I don’t think he’s all he could be and I don’t think he’s all that he deserves to be. . . . He should be a rich and famous writer.”

As for Tibbs, he says there are days when “the sad wind touches me,” but mostly he is content and at peace.

“They tell me at best that life is unfair,” he says. “But I don’t think that. I think life is fair.”

He mulls that over for a moment. “You know,” he confides, “maybe I say that because I want to believe it.”