Roy Reed, reporter who covered the civil rights struggle, dies at age 87

On June 6, 1966, James Meredith tried to make history for the second time. Having integrated the University of Mississippi in 1962, he announced a plan to walk from Memphis, Tennessee, deep into his neighboring home state. Before getting very far, however, a white man shot him in the back.

More than 1,000 miles away in New York City, the national editor of The New York Times, Claude Sitton, was scanning the photos being transmitted over the wire and the images on his television while looking for his reporter who was covering Meredith.

“Where’s Roy Reed?” he demanded.

To Reed’s chagrin, he had been several hundred yards down the road in a grocery store with other reporters, having a cold Coca-Cola. He scrambled to the scene, however, and filed the day’s story, then further redeemed himself by scoring the first interview with Meredith in his hospital room.

Reed, a self-professed “hicktalking Arkansawyer” who worked for The Times from 1965-78, spending much of that time crisscrossing the American South, died Sunday night at a hospital in Fayetteville, Arkansas, his son, John, said. He was 87. He had been unconscious since having a severe stroke at his home in Hogeye, near Fayetteville, on Saturday morning.

Aside from the soda incident, a story he told on himself with perverse pride, Reed seemed to have an uncanny knack for being in the right place. He was there on Feb. 5, 1965, when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was released from jail in Selma, Alabama, after spending several days behind bars for trying to lead a voting-rights protest march. Reed not only wrote the front-page article; he also ended up inadvertently in the photograph that ran with it.

He was at the Pettus Bridge in Selma on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, when troopers, as he wrote, “tore through a column of Negro demonstrators with tear gas, nightsticks and whips.” Choking from his own exposure to tear gas, Reed filed a vivid story that said “the wedge moved with such force that it seemed almost to pass over the waiting column instead of through it.” As the protesters went down under the swinging billy clubs, he wrote, “a cheer went up from the white spectators lining the south side of the highway.”

Remembering the scene years later, he wrote, “I hope never again to see such hatred in the eyes of men, women and, yes, children.”

In “The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation,” Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff wrote that Reed “could write magically, choosing words that caught your eye.” Sitton hired him, they wrote, because he “knew Reed to be unfailingly accurate, deeply reflective, uncommonly polite, and, like the Times reporters who had preceded him in the South, he spoke Southern.”

Roy Earl Reed was born on Feb. 14, 1930, in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and grew up in Piney, in the state’s western Hill Country. His parents were Roy Edward Reed, a grocer, and Ella Meredith Reed. A younger sister, Hattie, died in 1964.

In 1952, he married the former Norma Pendleton, who survives him.

Reed studied journalism at the University of Missouri, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and worked at The Globe in Joplin, Missouri, from 1954-56. From there, he made his way to The Arkansas Gazette in Little Rock, taking time off to continue his journalism studies with a Neiman fellowship at Harvard as a member of its class of 1964.

The Times hired him six months after he returned to The Gazette. He did his first Southern reporting for the newspaper from a base in Atlanta, then moved to the Washington bureau in 1966, covering national politics and the White House.

As a White House correspondent Reed sometimes took trips with Lady Bird Johnson, often as the only male reporter in a group of 20 or 25. “All of them, including Mrs. Johnson, treated me like one of the girls,” he said.

He returned to the South in 1969 to work from New Orleans, and ended his Times career as a correspondent based in London.

After leaving the newspaper, he taught journalism at the University of Arkansas and wrote several books.