READ DECEPTION IN RIDEAU’S EDUCATION
Wilbert Rideau has told reporters many times over the years how he struggled to educate himself on death row. His colorful accounts include tales of guards who smuggled books to him so he could learn to read and write.
The truth is that Wilbert Rideau already knew how to read and write when he arrived on death row on April 11, 1962. He was an honor student at W.O. Boston High School in Lake Charles, Louisiana. That inconvenient fact was reported in the May 9, 1986 edition of The Reveille, the campus newspaper of the Louisiana State University by staff writer H. Clay Ward. In 1987, Ward was honored with a Scripps Howard Award for excellence in college newspaper reporting. Furthermore, Rideau told Peter Wilkerson in an October 1990 Details Magazine article that he was an “honor student” in high school “making straight ‘A’s’.”
I was on death row too, five years and nine months from March 1967 to November 1972. I filed the first successful Louisiana prisoner lawsuit in federal court challenging the conditions on the Row. I won that suit with the assistance of Richard Hand, a brilliant, dedicated civil rights attorney who practices law today on Long Island, New York. I know first hand about the deplorable conditions on the Row. Rideau and I both endured them. But we did not lack for books. That, and what I know about the guards he says smuggled the literary masterworks to him that he says he read in 1962, refute his stories.
In The Times of Acadiana (Aug. 22, 2001), R. Reese Fuller had this to say about Wilbert Rideau and his “books” on death row:
“While living on Death Row as Condemned No. 18, Rideau began to reassess his life and his actions. He read the Bible, the only book prisoners were on Death Row were allowed to read.
“In a 1993 Life article titled ‘The Most Rehabilitated Prisoner in America,’ Rideau told of sympathetic guards smuggling him books, including Westerns, mysteries, pornographic novels and even a textbook titled Electromagnetism. When other books were finally allowed on Death Row, he says read about Napoleon, Muhammad, Lincoln, Washington, Bolivar, Sukarno, and John F. Kennedy’s book, Profiles in Courage.”
In Details Magazine article, Wilkerson wrote this about Rideau and his books on death row:
“Guards—white guards—smuggled him books on slavery and that perennial inmate favorite, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. During a long eleven years on death row, Rideau said he taught himself to read and write, expanding his world while locked in a cell.”
Wilbert Rideau was not on death row for 11 years. He spent three years and six months on the Row. The rest of the time, from February 1961 when he was first arrested to 1973 when he was sentenced to life in prison after his third trial, he spent in parish jails awaiting trial or new trials each time his conviction was overturned. (Each time he won a new trial during those years he was taken off death row.)
These two articles are examples of the pattern of deception that he used for years to enhance his image as a heroic black man in a racist prison struggling against all odds to educate himself.
In April 1962, when Rideau went to death row the first time, it consisted of two 15-man tiers located in the prison’s Reception Center near Angola’s front gate. It was one floor below the prison’s infamous maximum security tier known as CCR (close custody restricted). Convict guards ruled the prison. They were trustees who were given the authority to carry guns and supervise prisoners. Regular prison guards worked 8-hour shifts: 6 a.m. till 2:00 p.m.; 2:00 p.m. till 10:00 p.m. The “graveyard shift on death row,” – 10:00 p.m. till 6:00 a.m. – was usually manned by a “convict guard.” They were cruel white men who hated blacks.
There was not one regular African-American guard at the prison in 1962. Those guards were all white. They lived in a small community on the prison’s sprawling 18,000 acres called “’B-Line.” They were rural whites without high school educations or college degrees who hated blacks. Racial tension resulted in violence all across the south as whites rose up to fight the early days of integration which fueled their hatred. Louisiana, and the rest of the Old South, was in the throes of serious political convulsions in 1962 as civil rights marchers demanded freedom for blacks and desegregated school.
In 1962, when Rideau arrived on death row, prisoners were allowed to have a Bible and a small transistor radio that had to be placed on the floor in front of their individual cells. But there was no official “rule” banning books as he claimed. Western novels and detective mysteries were commonplace on its tiers as in the rest of the prison.
Rideau spent just 14 months on death row between April 1962 and June 1963 before his first conviction and death sentence were reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court on grounds that pre-trial publicity had prejudiced his jury and he was returned to the parish jail in Lake Charles. His first year and two months on death row coincided with an era of racial hatred and unrest that is almost inconceivable in today’s integrated society.
Sit-ins and freedom riders were crisscrossing the south. In 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregated transportation facilities were unconstitutional. The Defense Department ordered the full integration of all military reserve units except the National Guard. Riots occurred in neighboring Mississippi when James Meredith became the first black in history to register at the University of Mississippi.
It strains credulity to think that white guards in a southern prison would smuggle books to the most notorious black killer in Louisiana’s history, particularly books about slavery, Atlas Shrugged, and Electromagnetism, with the fires of racial hatred burning across the south. Those kinds of books didn’t exist in the Louisiana State Penitentiary in 1962. Since they were not available there (and it can be reasonably assumed they were not part of the “personal library” of prison guards), that means any prison guard who “smuggled” the books to Rideau had to make a 70-mile round trip to Baton Rouge to buy them.
Assuming for the sake of argument that there were white guards willing to put aside their racist attitudes long enough to smuggle books into death row for a notorious black killer, one must get by the fact that Rideau, by his own admission, “hated white people” in 1962. He tried to shoot three whites to death in February 1961, murdering one when he stabbed her in the heart and slit her throat. He freely stated then, as he has many times in interviews since, that his hatred for whites was a factor in his crime. How then, did he befriend white guards the very next year to the point that they would smuggle books to him and become so close to them?
Rideau went back to death row following his second conviction in December 1966 and remained there until May 1969. He could have read about Napoleon, Muhammad, Lincoln, Washington, Bolivar, Sukarno and John F. Kennedy’s book Profiles in Courage during that 28-month period as he told Life Magazine in 1993. Those kinds of books were easily available to death row inmates then.
I don’t doubt that Rideau read some of the “classics” and significant pieces of literature during his early incarceration. But it was a lie, pure and simple, that the honor student taught himself to “read and write” on death row in 1962 by reading books that white guards smuggled to him on death row.
What is almost more disturbing is that reporters who interviewed him didn’t take the time to analyze, much less investigate, his story about the book smuggling.
On its face, his story is so compelling: an illiterate black inmate on death row in a Southern prison being assisted in his courageous efforts to learn to read by white guards willing to risk being fired and losing their standing in the B-Line community to smuggle books to him. What a mesmerizing tale!
Perhaps the reporters were misled by Louisiana’s Secretary of Corrections, C. Paul Phelps, who always vouched for Rideau’s veracity. Perhaps they were swayed by the journalism awards he had won by then, convinced a fellow “reporter” would not lie to them. Perhaps they were in love with the colorful details the stories added to their own journalistic efforts.
Whatever the reason, the facts now deserve their day in the sun.
