Wilbert Rideau was born in Lawtell, Louisiana, on February 13, 1942. When he was six, his family moved to Lake Charles, a developing oil town in the Southwest part of the state near the Texas border. Wilbert grew up in the Jim Crow South, in a world sharply divided by race, where social attitudes and cultural traditions handed down from the time of slavery were reinforced by laws that kept blacks and whites segregated their entire lives.

"If you did not live in the Deep South in pre-integration days you do not really know the South, and especially you certainly do not know the Louisiana of those days," wrote Ray I. Broussard, a white reporter for the News Banner (Covington, Louisiana), in a recent column titled "Rideau has been rehabilitated and should be let out of prison." Broussard recalled: "I used to watch the eyes of blacks when bully-boy whites ordered them to the end of the line, or to the back of the bus, or out the door of a segregated cafe, or away from the lunch counter. The eyes of some blacks would seethe with hatred so palpable you could see it."

Little wonder, when daily life served up a smorgasbord of humiliating and embittering reminders to African Americans of their status as untouchables: signs designating "whites only" or "colored" enforced segregation in schools, restaurants, buses, trains, waiting rooms, public parks, swimming pools, and drinking fountains. Even churches and cemeteries were divided by race. Economic and political power was by whites and for whites: if African Americans attempted to register to vote, they were subjected to "literacy tests" and "moral standards" not applied to whites. Although many today do not want to dwell on this unsavory chapter in American history, no one except perhaps Louisianian David Duke would deny that it was a reality and that the services, facilities, and institutions for African Americans were unequal and inferior to those enjoyed by whites.

As a youngster in the 1940s and 1950s, Wilbert attended the all-black Second Ward Elementary School. He had a lively intelligence, loved science, and dreamed of becoming a spaceman like his high-flying comic book hero, Flash Gordon. But as Ray Broussard rightly guessed, "in an era of unspeakable racism, Rideau was likely coached by some of his elders . . . to remember the credo: if you're black, step back. If you're white, you're all right." Indeed, Wilbert vividly remembers the adults in his world telling him to "get his head out of the clouds" and learn his place in the world.

Poor even by the standards of the black community, Wilbert recalls that before the free lunch program was initiated, he frequently had nothing to take to school for lunch but a cold sweet potato which, he says, he threw away out of embarrassment as often as not. Shy and socially awkward, the skinny little boy had a difficult time making friends. When his parents divorced, everything went further downhill. The family's poverty intensified. Wilbert's inability to fit in with his classmates grew worse. After he transferred to the W.O. Boston Colored High School in grade eight, he began playing hooky from school, shooting dice on the unkempt and vandalized tombs in the overgrown cemetery across the street from his house. There, he bought friendships with other truants in the form of cigarettes, sold three for a nickel at the corner store, no questions asked. At age 13, he found a job at a local grocery where the white owner looked the other way when he said he was 16 and had quit school. The trade-off was payment at less than minimum wage, which reinforced Wilbert's ever-growing sense that fairness was not to be expected from white people. Eventually, he stopped going to school altogether. A series of low-paying, menial jobs - frequently two or three at a time - was his passport to the pool hall and the gin joints, where he looked close enough to legal age that the owners didn't turn away his dollars. He bought rounds of drinks and gallons of gas, and slid into a life of loose alliances that passed for friendship. He hated his life, which dead-ended at a broom in the daytime, and in a barroom at night.

"I had just reached a point when I saw life in terms of us and them," Wilbert told Louisiana writer Anne Butler in 1990. "Somewhere along the way, I had concluded that 'they' had everything, that this was the way it worked. Well, I wasn't gonna accept it on those terms. . . . The situation was intolerable, unacceptable. . . . I just wanted change; I wanted something better than this. I wanted out, I guess, much the same as that person who'll go sit in the car and pipe the fumes in. And wanting out was at a desperate enough level that even when I was standing before the judge and being sentenced to death, it didn't mean nothing. I had just reached that level of despair, desperation, whatever."

At 19, Wilbert was convicted of murder (see The Legal Case: 1961-2001). Under sentence of death, Wilbert began to read voraciously, both the religious literature allowed to prisoners then, as well as books smuggled to him by the white deputies and prison guards whose job it was to watch him. It was a life-changing experience for him. As he read, he found new heroes who had transcended adversity in the real world - men like Lincoln, Bolivar, Anwar Sadat. And he also found heroism closer at hand, in the white men who put their very jobs at risk to bring him books. It forced him to see them with new eyes, as individuals. Speaking of his old perspective - black versus white - he told Anne Butler, "I had this clear image, the way I saw life and people, and it just went to smithereens."

On Death Row, Wilbert began to write, penning in longhand a book-length analysis of criminality that he expected to be found after his execution. He also wrote a manuscript for a novel about a young white boy finding his way in the segregated South. He struck up a correspondence with Clover Swann, a young editor at a New York publishing house, who tutored him through the mail in the art of writing.

In 1973, a year after the United States Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional in its Furman v. Georgia ruling, Wilbert was released into the general population at Angola. When his request to be assigned to the all-white Angolite staff was refused, he rounded up an all-black staff and started The Lifer, a publication aimed at men serving life sentences. In 1974, he began writing a weekly column, "The Jungle," for a chain of black-audience newspapers in the South. When the federal court in 1975 ordered wholesale reforms at Angola - then dubbed "the bloodiest prison in America" - and ordered integration of the inmates, among other reforms, outgoing warden C. Murray Henderson hurriedly installed Wilbert as editor of the Angolite. C. Paul Phelps, the incoming interim warden, who eventually became Secretary of Corrections, ratified that choice in 1976 and struck a deal with Wilbert Rideau that the Angolite would operate under the same standards of freedom and responsibility that applied to journalists in the "free world." He could print whatever he could prove.

Mr. Rideau had brought his Lifer co-editor, Tommy Mason, to the Angolite with him and the magazine was immediately transformed from a mimeographed newsletter into a glossy magazine that began winning national awards the very next year. With a series of writers, editors, and artists hand-picked by Wilbert Rideau, the Angolite and its staff won some of journalism's most prestigious awards and also won high praise from the free-world media. Co-editor Ron Wikberg's article, "The Horror Show," was widely credited as instrumental in shifting Louisiana?s method of execution from the flesh-burning electric chair to the more humane lethal injection.

By the late 70s, Mr. Rideau had become a sought-after speaker on criminal justice and journalism issues, lecturing at universities and appearing on local and national radio and television programs. In 1984, in one of many Nightline appearances, he shared the electronic stage with Chief Justice Warren Burger of the United States Supreme Court. In 1989 and 1990, he flew to Washington, D.C., to address the annual convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

In 1991, Mr. Rideau and Mr. Wikberg collaborated with University of Louisiana professor Burk Foster to produce a criminal justice textbook still in use today. The next year, following the release of Life Sentences by Random House, Messrs. Rideau and Wikberg were jointly named "Person of the Week," by ABC-TV's World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.

In the 1990s, Mr. Rideau branched out beyond print journalism. He became a correspondent for National Public Radio's Fresh Air and embarked on a series of collaborations with "free-world" partners that netted prestigious awards: "Tossing Away the Keys," a 1990 NPR documentary, won a Livingston Award for co-producer Dave Isay; "In for Life," a short documentary done in 1994 with ABC-TV's Paul Slavin for Day One, won a CINE Golden Eagle for Mr. Rideau and then-Angolite editor Michael Glover; Final Judgment: The Execution of Antonio James, an hour-long documentary done in 1996 with independent film producers Liz Garbus and Jonathan Stack for the Discovery Channel, won both a CINE Golden Eagle and the Thurgood Marshall Award; and The Farm, a second collaboration with Mr. Stack and Ms. Garbus in 1998, yielded an Oscar nomination for the film and a Tree of Life Award for Mr. Rideau.

Mr. Rideau remains editor of the Angolite. In his spare time, he is currently working on a major research project.