Wilbert Rideau The Real Story

Wilbert Rideau’s recently released memoir, In The Place of Justice, is filled with so many factual errors, misrepresentations, and lies that it’s really difficult to chronicle all in a coherent manner for the public record. I will now add to his list of journalistic indiscretions “credit hogging” and “idea thievery.” People who knew Rideau quite well in the prison community understood his incurable propensity to “hog the credit” on any project he worked on and to co-opt other people’s ideas and pass them off as his own. So long before In the Place of Justice wormed its way into public domain, I knew it would contain a heaping dose of this historical behavior. And I was not disappointed!

In Chapter 7, titled “Truth Behind Bars,” Rideau chronicles the early journalistic success of The Angolite, the official publication of the Louisiana State Penitentiary. I joined the staff of the newsmagazine in August 1977. In December of that year the magazine was named the best penal publication in America by the American Penal Press sponsored by the School of Journalism at Southern Illinois University. It was the first journalism award recognition ever paid to the magazine. The award belonged to Rideau because I had not worked on any of the publications considered by the American Penal Press in reaching its decision. Thus, Rideau deserved all the credit that came his way.

In early 1978 it was announced that The Angolite was a finalist in the first ever National Magazine Awards competition. The prison publication lost out to Scientific American at the May 11, 1978 awards ceremonies. The awards competition had 1300 entries from magazines across the country. I was not responsible to any significant degree for the entries submitted by The Angolite from its 1977 publications. Thus, Rideau deserved rightful credit for the national media attention given to him for this journalistic achievement.

These awards served as a stimulus to not only mine and Rideau’s creative juices but to the prison administration’s desire to have “good publicity.” While the magazine and the administration joined in a mutual admiration society, the inmates still considered The Angolite a “sell-out rag” for the administration. More copies went into the trash cans unread than read when delivered to the inmate dorms. It was a fact of life Rideau and I discussed. I conveyed to him my idea about doing two stories for back-to-back editions in 1978: one concerned the brutal and graphic account of the June 1974 suicide of Billy Ray White, a friend of mine and a legend in the Angola prison community; and the other concerned a feature story about the prison’s “old time” prison guards whose character I described as straight as “the lines on a West Texas highway.”

I wrote both articles. They were titled “An Anatomy of a Prison Suicide” and “The Vanishing Breed.” Rideau did conduct an interview with one of the guards and took all the photographs for “The Vanishing Breed” article. But both articles were exclusively my work product—and they had a profound impact on the prison community among both inmate and free personnel alike. One inmate coined the term “blood-and-guts journalism” to describe the articles. The magazine suddenly became immensely popular forcing the administration to increase the number of copies printed.

In his memoir, however, Rideau painted a different picture. He said the 1977/78 awards recognition “energized” him and he began mapping “out major stories for the remainder of the year [1978], selecting each for its potential impact or appeal to diverse segments of the prison community. The editorial mix I sought was first displayed in the July/August 1978 issue, which featured ‘Anatomy of a [Prison] Suicide,’ Billy’s chilling account of the life and death of his best friend, Billy Ray White, who committed suicide and slowly bled to death in a cell adjacent to Billy’s while the two men talked …”

Can any respectable journalist truly believe that Rideau, the magazine’s editor, “mapped out” my piece “Anatomy of a Prison Suicide”? He attributes the article as my “chilling account,” failing to even give me credit as its author. He “hogs the credit” by passing the story idea off as his own. It’s shameful.

To further ensure that he would get all the credit for the magazine’s success following “Anatomy of a Prison Suicide,” Rideau said: “Billy aspired to match my recognition as a professional journalist. He began to think hard about stories and to focus on writing objectively, which was difficult for him because he intended to moralize, seeing the world as black-and-white. I suggested he use his knowledge of the law to educate inmates about their rights, the workings of the justice system, and legal news and issues important to them. He took to it immediately, writing lengthy legal essays into actual cases of Angola prisoners … I concentrated on analytical and investigative reports.”

The problem with that self-serving description is that the record does not support it. Rideau lied to make himself look like a “professional journalist.” All I have to do is use the public record to discredit what he said. There was not one article which appeared in The Angolite in either 1978 or 1979 under my byline that could remotely be described as a “lengthy legal essay.” Rideau and I were co-recipients of the 1979 Robert F. Kennedy Award based on three 1978 articles that appeared in the magazine. I wrote two of them—and they were not “lengthy legal essays.” We both won the 1979 George Polk Award. He won it for an article titled “The Sexual Jungle” and I won it for an article titled “The Other Side of Murder,” an in-depth piece about the history of capital punishment. In 1979 Rideau won the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel for an article titled “Conversations with the Dead.” In 1980 I won the ABA Silver Gavel for my piece “A Prison Tragedy,” a piece about the killing of a popular “black militant.”The Angolite won the 1981 Sidney Hillman Award for a piece titled “Louisiana Death Watch,” another in-depth piece about capital punishment. I wrote that article as well.

Does this sound like I was writing “legal news” while Rideau “concentrated on analytical and investigative reports?” These are the facts supported by the public record.

Why wasn’t his individual Polk and Silver Gavel awards and the shared Kennedy/Hillman awards enough?

To dismiss my significant journalistic contributions to The Angolite as “lengthy legal essays” by a “jailhouse lawyer” while hogging all the credit for “analytical and investigative reports” by a “professional journalist” is shameful.

Still, I guarantee you one thing you will not hear New York Times’ Dwight Garner, CNN’s Roland Martin, Associated Press’ Mary Foster, or NPR’s Fresh Air host Terry Gross take Rideau to task over this journalistic thievery. They’ve drank the kool aid.

But as Pope John said: “It is what it is.” Rideau can run but he can’t hide from the facts.