PROFESSOR DAVID OSHINSKY ON WILBERT RIDEAU
On June 3, 2010 David Oshinksy—a professor of history at the University of Texas and New York University—reviewed Wilbert Rideau’s recently released memoir In The Place of Justice (Random House 2010) for The New York Times. It marked the second book review the Times has carried about Rideau’s sloppily researched and poorly written memoir, which is really nothing more than a celebration of his personal and professional corruption. One can certainly draw a reasonable conclusion that the Times is endorsing this former convicted murderer’s memoir to an even greater extent than it did Jack Henry Abbott’s In the Belly of the Beast in 1981. Just as the Times chose to ignore Abbott’s lethal potential for violence, which ultimately proved embarrassing to the media giant, the newspaper has chosen to ignore Rideau’s admitted ethical lapses including plagiarism and embellishments of his personal and professional history. This decision will also prove to be an ultimate embarrassment to the newspaper.
Of course, with prominent journalists like Ted Koppel calling the memoir “an extraordinary book” and historians like David Oshinsky deliberately misrepresenting Rideau’s crime to the disturbing point that they are transforming his victims into “criminals” for resisting his murderous assault on February 16, 1961 near English Bayou in Calcasieu Parish, The New York Times obviously feels compelled to engage in a little history revisionism. The nation’s largest newspaper is determined to let reviewers like Professor Oshinsky and Dwight Garner revise Wilbert Rideau’s robbery of a bank, the kidnapping of three employees, the attempt to kill and the wounding all three hostages, and the methodical killing of one female hostage with knife wounds to the heart and throat into the “reckless” act of manslaughter attributable more to the victim’s resistance than Rideau’s criminal intent.
In the fifth paragraph of Oshinsky’s review, the history professor misrepresented history itself by saying: “In 1963, the Supreme Court threw out Rideau’s conviction, citing numerous violations.” (Bold added) The U.S. Supreme Court in Rideau v. Louisiana in June 1963 reversed Rideau’s original murder conviction for one constitutional violation: a denial of due process of law based on excessive pretrial publicity. If Oshinsky is going to dabble in legal history, the professor should realize you have to read a court decision in order to properly interpret it for the public. But, of course, saying that Rideau’s original conviction was reversed because of “numerous [constitutional] violations” enhances and perpetuates his self-made and media proclaimed stature as a “victim of the racist South.”
The second significant historical misrepresentation in Oshinsky’s review is this factual error: “As reforms were implemented, the violence was decreased. The new Angola owed much to Rideau’s skills as editor, gadfly and ombudsman.” Oshinsky was referring the period shortly after a federal court in 1975 declared Angola “unconstitutional.” In the wake of that federal court intervention, C. Paul Phelps was appointed Corrections Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Corrections and Ross Maggio was appointed Warden of Angola. By the end of 1976, Maggio had personally transformed Angola from the “bloodiest prison in America” into one of the safest maximum security prisons in the country.
Rideau became editor of The Angolite in 1976. I joined the staff of the magazine in August 1977. The publication had not garnered any journalism awards and certainly did not have any influence at all in the prison community. While Rideau had begun a “budding” career as a writer for several free world publications in 1974/75, he did not possess any power or influence in the Angola inmate community. In fact, at that point in The Angolite’s history, Rideau was viewed among black inmates as an “Uncle Tom” for the white prison administration and a “snitch” among white inmates. The prison magazine did not achieve its national media reputation until Rideau and I were named co-recipients of the 1979 Robert F. Kennedy Special Journalism Award and the prestigious George Polk Award—awards based on individual articles written by me and Rideau. This national media recognition ultimately proved beneficial over the next several years in The Angolite gaining greater acceptance in the Angola inmate community.
There is not one prison official in Louisiana who will say that Wilbert Rideau’s “skills as editor, gadfly and ombudsman” remotely had anything to do with Ross Maggio transforming Angola from the most violent into one of the safest maximum security prisons in the country in 1976. If any inmates deserve any credit for this accomplishment, it would be Hayes Williams and the other inmates who brought the civil rights lawsuit against Angola prison officials in the mid-1970s that led to the federal court intervention in 1975 which gave Warden Maggio the constitutional authority necessary to clean up the prison. Wilbert Rideau had nothing to do with that lawsuit, or any other lawsuit filed by inmates challenging conditions at Angola. If Professor Oshinsky had truly read Rideau’s memoir, he would have realized the “convict editor” always stood “arm-in-arm” with the prison officials he lavishly praised—all of whom (except Maggio and Burl Cain) ultimately resigned or retired under a cloud of corruption and criminal wrongdoing—while he criticized inmates like Hayes Williams as rabble-rousing troublemakers and outside prison reform advocates like Sister Helen Prejean as “busy-body do-gooders” trying to upset the corrupt status quo Rideau and his prison official cohorts were trying to protect.
I challenge Professor Oshinsky to ask Ross Maggio if “the new Angola owed much” to Wilbert Rideau for cleaning up the violent and corrupt prison in 1976.
And I would suggest that Professor Oshinsky stick to teaching New York and Texas history because he clearly does not know very much about Louisiana’s history, particularly its prison system.
