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.
Read more about this topic: Wilbert Rideau
Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
“Later you hear it wander the dark house
Like a mother who rises at night to seek a childhood picture;
Or it goes to the backyard and stands like an old horse cold in the
pasture.”
—Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989)
“[Children] do not yet lie to themselves and therefore have not entered upon that important tacit agreement which marks admission into the adult world, to wit, that I will respect your lies if you will agree to let mine alone. That unwritten contract is one of the clear dividing lines between the world of childhood and the world of adulthood.”
—Leontine Young (20th century)
“What sacred instinct did inspire
My soul in childhood with a hope so strong?”
—Thomas Traherne (1636–1674)