Baton Rouge, La. ? Wilbert Rideau, imprisoned since the days “whites only” signs hung across the South, enjoyed his first full day of freedom Sunday, after a jury effectively decided he had been punished enough for a killing that continues to divide his hometown along racial lines.

Rideau, a black man convicted three times in the case by all-white juries, transformed himself into an award-winning journalist during more than four decades in the nation’s bloodiest prison. He walked free Saturday when a racially mixed jury found him guilty of a lesser charge of manslaughter.

A quietly jubilant Rideau savored his new freedom Sunday in Baton Rouge, relaxing at a friend’s house and blinking in a world he left behind when John Kennedy was the new president.

“I’m still trying to wrap my mind around it,” Rideau told The Associated Press in one of his first interviews since the verdict in his native Lake Charles. “Jail is so far distant. It’s distant.”

Rideau, 62, never denied that he killed Julia Ferguson on Feb. 16, 1961, and shot two others after a botched robbery. Testifying for the first time in this trial, he said it was an act of panic.

Prosecutors, seeking a murder conviction and a life sentence, scoffed at Rideau’s contention that although he killed Ferguson, he didn’t murder her. But after deliberating for nearly six hours, the jury of eight whites and four blacks agreed with him that the crime was not planned or premeditated.

Since he has spent nearly 44 years in prison — more than double the 21-year maximum for manslaughter when the crime occurred — he was immediately released.

“It offers hope to the black community. It’s a new day,” said the Rev. J.L. Franklin of Lake Charles, who has led a minister’s group that has pushed for years for Rideau’s release.

Rideau was a janitor and eighth-grade dropout when he entered the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. Behind bars, he became a self-educated writer and helped expose the violence behind prison walls, elevating the prison magazine, The Angolite, to national acclaim.

Wilbert Rideau talks about his release from prison at a friend's home in Baton Rouge, La. Rideau was released Saturday from the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, where he had been imprisoned since 1961.

He gained fame and numerous awards, co-directing the Oscar-nominated prison documentary “The Farm” and co-writing and narrating an award-winning National Public Radio documentary. Life magazine once called him “the most rehabilitated prisoner in America.”

Jurors were barred from hearing about Rideau’s accomplishments in prison.

Prosecutors “figured they would convict me on the case. The stuff that would get me the sympathy, they kept out,” Rideau said Sunday. “Ironically, I got freed on the case. A lot of the ‘facts’ turned out to be myths.”