Wilbert Rideau - Childhood

Childhood

When he was six, Rideau's family moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana (a city about 30 miles from the Texas border on Interstate 10). He attended the all-black Second Ward Elementary School. Rideau was born into poverty and, when his parents later divorced, he became even poorer. He transferred to W.O. Boston Colored High School when he was in eighth grade and soon started skipping class attendance. At 13, Rideau got a job at a grocery store and eventually stopped going to school. He had just turned 19 when he committed the bank robbery and killing that would take him to Angola penitentiary for more than four decades.

Rideau spent 12 years on death row for killing Ferguson until the U.S. Supreme Court, in its 1972 Furman v. Georgia ruling, abolished the death penalty as it was then applied. Rideau, like all other condemned in Louisiana, had his sentence judicially amended to life imprisonment for the crimes by the Louisiana Supreme Court.