Tomorrow evening Brazos Bookstore in Houston host an author event for Wilbert Rideau and his memoir, In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance. Details of the event are here.
As noted previously, a number of author events are already scheduled, in addition to the Houston event.
May 18 – 6:00 pm: Octavia Books, New Orleans
May 25 – 7:00 pm: Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, Atlanta.
June 3 – 7:00 pm: Book Passage, (Corte Madera) San Francisco
June 7 – 7:00 pm: Politics and Prose, Washington D.C.
June 10 – 7:00 pm: Zocolo, Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles
There have been several book reviews since my last posting on the book. On May 4, the New York Times published the review , "One Man’s Hard Road, From Existing to Living," by Dwight Garner.
When white Louisianans looked at Wilbert Rideau, they saw a beast as much as a man. Such were the racial realities of the South in 1961 that Mr. Rideau’s impressions of whites were nearly as blinkered. The novelist Richard Wright might have been speaking for Mr. Rideau when he wrote in “Native Son” that, for Bigger Thomas, “white people were not really people; they were a sort of great natural force, like a stormy sky looming overhead or like a deep swirling river stretching suddenly at one’s feet in the dark.”
After a trial in which his defense team did not call a single witness, Mr. Rideau was sent to America’s most notorious prison, Angola, and put on death row. That’s where this memoir, a soul-stirring account of one man’s long road to redemption, begins in earnest. In Angola, Mr. Rideau became a reader, and then a writer. He eventually became the editor of The Angolite, the prison’s magazine. He was the first black editor of a prison magazine in America and also, under some enlightened wardens, the first to edit one that was essentially uncensored.
Under Mr. Rideau, The Angolite ran painstaking exposés: about sexual life at the prison, about poor medical services, about a cruelly malfunctioning electric chair. Mr. Rideau was good at what he did. The Angolite was the first prison publication to be nominated for a National Magazine Award, and he won a George Polk Award, one of the highest honors in American journalism. He became a correspondent for “Fresh Air” on National Public Radio, and was a co-director of a documentary, “The Farm: Angola, USA,” that was nominated for an Academy Award.
Mr. Rideau brings his calmly appraising journalistic eye to this memoir. It is packed with incisive details. He notes that on death row, a prisoner’s last meal is usually ordered for, and eaten by, his friends. “Condemned men,” he writes, “usually lost their appetites.”
Steve Weinberg contributed this review to the San Francisco Chronicle, on May 2.
Incarcerated in Louisiana's Angola prison, Rideau decided to serve his sentence as a model prisoner. He had no inkling that he would become perhaps the most celebrated inmate not only in Louisiana but also across the nation. The basis of Rideau's fame: a prison newspaper named the Angolite.
Most prison newspapers looked amateurish and disseminated no meaningful information because of heavy censorship. The Angolite had fit that stereotype from its start. Rideau conjured up a different vision. Although he harbored no expectation of a prison job at the Angolite - the staff had previously consisted of all Caucasian prisoners - unexpected circumstances led to Rideau obtaining a job on the newspaper. Because of his intelligence and honesty that impressed a relatively enlightened Caucasian warden, Rideau soon became editor in chief.
Rideau expressed determination to publish meaningful news and feature stories, thus keeping fellow inmates and prison staff alike well informed, entertained and proud of the recognition the Angolite received across the United States for its uncensored status. In a racist prison system, wardens with the clout of dictators usually treated black inmates cruelly, and almost never showed respect for independent spirits.
For whatever reasons, Angola prison, with a historical reputation for violence and squalor, became blessed with a series of wardens who understood that a strong newspaper would serve as a point of pride for otherwise disgruntled inmates, and could simultaneously alert the prison staff to problems as well as potential solutions.
The evolution of Rideau as the nation's premier prison journalist is a central thread to his well-written, candid memoir. But it is not the only thread. Perhaps no book written by an inmate has ever conveyed so much factual and emotional information about day-to-day prison life. The cornucopia of information rarely seems overwhelming because Rideau is a first-rate stylist, a man of letters despite sparse formal education.
A review by the Associated Press, "Prison journalist pens readable autobiography," is by Mary Foster.
Rideau tells his story in riveting detail, beginning with how he grew up a poor black kid in heavily segregated Lake Charles, La.
He writes about the crime that landed him on death row at Angola, Louisiana's penitentiary, then known as the bloodiest prison in the nation: It was an ill-conceived bank robbery hatched by a naive kid who planned to finish in time to meet his ride home so he wouldn't have to face the danger of waiting for the bus in the white part of town.
Rideau also makes a convincing argument that he was kept in prison far longer than anyone else convicted of murder in 1961 because he is a black man who killed a white woman — bank teller Julia Ferguson.
The amazing part of Rideau's story, however, is his transformation from an uneducated, prejudiced teen to a thoughtful, well-read adult who became so well-respected by prison wardens that they began calling on him for help and advice.
Earlier coverage begins with this post.
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