On the eve of his electrocution last October for rape, 24-year-old Willie Tolbert gave the first & last interview of his life. At the request of an Associated Press client, A. P. Reporter Deling Booth had gone to the Columbia, S.C. death house to get Tolbert's version of the acts for which he was tried.
At the trial, Willie Tolbert had heard a teen-age white girl testify that the unarmed man had forced his way into her automobile, threatened to choke her if her white companion interfered, raped her twice. Tolbert, who had a criminal record, refused to say a word in his own defense. In ten minutes of deliberation, the all-white jury found him guilty.
But to Reporter Booth, the condemned man told his side. Said Willie: "It wan't that way, the way they said in court." The couple had asked him to find some whisky, he said; later, the girl had willingly submitted to him. Why hadn't Tolbert testified? Said he: "The sheriff he told me not to get up an' say nothin' in court."
By the time Reporter Booth's story was published in South Carolina newspapers next day, Willie Tolbert was dead. A few South Carolinians had already read a similar story in the little Negro weekly, the Columbia Lighthouse and Informer. Under his own byline, Editor & Publisher John H. McCray had printed a secondhand account of Tolbert's story, obtained from Tolbert's Negro attorney.
Last week Reporter Booth and Publisher McCray were separately indicted for criminal libel, arrested and released on bail. The charge: writing "false, malicious and defamatory" stories about the girl in the case. Maximum penalty: $5,000 fine, one year in jail. Both Booth and McCray had obeyed the "South Carolina law which prohibits the use of a rape victim's name. But the grand jury reasoned that her identity was widely known anyway, and the damage to her "splendid reputation" was just as great. At week's end, the A.P. had taken no public action to defend Reporter Booth: it was keeping as mum as Willie Tolbert had in court.