Delbert Tibbs stood on a stage and spoke slowly and deliberately about the time he spent five years as a death row inmate.
"God sent me to death row so I could be a witness," he said in front of an audience at Peeler Auditorium Tuesday night.
Tibbs, now in his 70s, was featured in events on DePauw's campus this week to tell the story of his 1974 arrest that eventually put him on death row for five years after he was wrongfully accused of rape and murder in Fort Meyers, Fla.
In 1974, Tibbs was enjoying his youth traveling across the U.S.-by foot. He had held several jobs before attending the Chicago Theological Seminary from 1970 to 1972, but after two years, he decided the seminary was not the right place for him.
Tibbs was walking along a highway in Mississippi when was he stopped by a police officer who informed him he was wanted for arrest in Ft. Meyers, Fla. He was moved to the city and watched the news coverage of himself arriving in handcuffs a few days later from a Fort Meyers jail.
He said it was only after he was picked out of a lineup that morning that he realized the amount of trouble he was in.
"I was living in some sort of nightmare," he said.
Tibbs was found guilty for the rape of a 17-year-old woman and a 27-year-old man in front of an all-white jury, despite the fact he did not meet the witness's description. The woman said it was a 5'4" black man, and Tibbs is well over 6'2". And he had never even been to Fort Meyers, Fla.
What followed was an eight-year battle that reached as high as the Florida Supreme Court before the case was eventually dropped by the prosecutor who said his witness may not be reliable.
But Tibbs still spent five of those eight years in a maximum security Florida state prison.
Tibbs spoke to the crowd Tuesday night about his experience in a casual, informative voice-sometimes even with humor-but stressed the power of "agitation" to create change.
A friend of his from Chicago started the Gilbert Tibbs Defense Committee to raise awareness and money for Tibbs' case and created a small national movement for his release.
"Agitation makes a difference," Tibbs said. "It lets the powers that be know that people are not satisfied with the way things are."
Tibbs' continues to fight today through the Witness to Innocence advocacy group. An organization dedicated to abolishing the death penalty in America.
Nicki Hewell '11, Graduate Fellow at the Prindle Institute, worked with the Indiana Abolition Coalition and the Men of Justice, a DePauw organization, in bringing Tibbs and was happy with the turnout.
She said about 20 students also met with Tibbs for a more intimate conversation Wednesday afternoon at the Dorothy Brown Cultural Resource Center.
Senior Jorden Giger, President of Men for Justice, was impressed with Tibbs "willingness to share his personal stories" and emphasized the importance of his message.
"I think his story is incredibly important in an age in which men and women of color are being incarcerated at enormously high rates," Giger said. "We are the future of the United States and if we are unaware of the ways in which the least empowered or least represented groups among us are being disproportionately imprisoned, we run the risk of allowing injustice to continue on for another generation."