Roy Reed
Ernest Dumas was heading out Dec. 11 to play the round of golf that death had robbed from Roy Reed.
Reed, a giant in Arkansas journalism, was going to play a few holes on Saturday, Dec. 9, but a stroke intervened. The former Arkansas Gazette reporter and New York Times correspondent died a day later at age 87, after his family gathered to say goodbye.
“I’m heading out to play the round of golf that Roy didn’t get around to, so maybe I can share just a few thoughts here,” Dumas wrote to Arkansas Business.
Dumas, Reed’s journalistic kid brother at the Gazette from 1960 to Reed’s departure in 1965, is now his heir as Arkansas’ senior reporter.
Dumas wrote Reed’s obituary for the Arkansas Times, conveying the basic facts of Reed’s life — his rise from a Garland County childhood to the Gazette, then a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard and his subsequent coverage of the civil rights struggle for an international audience. Reed told his own story magically in a memoir, “Beware of Limbo Dancers: A Correspondent’s Adventures With the New York Times.”
Dumas, who knew Reed for 60 years, revered his old friend most as a storyteller, not as a hard-charging reporter. “Roy was not a typical journalist, at least not the brash prototype of Johnny Apple,” Dumas said, invoking another celebrated New York Times writer, R.W. Apple Jr. (Apple’s boasts about having killed a few Vietcong in the 1960s, for example, reportedly drew this response from a wiseacre colleague: “Women and children, I presume?”)
Reed wasn’t “swaggering, assertive, willing to take great risks to get a story,” Dumas recalled. “He was just the opposite: polite, even meek, prone to excessive self-examination.”
That nature is on full display in interviews for an oral history of the Arkansas Gazette that Reed oversaw as a journalism professor at the University of Arkansas. Those interviews, with dozens of Gazette veterans, feature some of the most compelling reading on Arkansas journalism you’ll ever see, and Reed compiled the best examples into a book, “Looking Back at the Arkansas Gazette.”
Reed had regrets, Dumas remembered, about writing one of the stories that put him on the radar of The New York Times. Bill Shelton, the legendary Gazette city editor, had assigned Reed to go to Mississippi County to write a brief story on something specific. Instead, Reed spent several days crafting a piece on how mechanization and market forces had changed the plantation system and transformed the Arkansas Delta. Reed’s “mammoth story” ran on the front page, Dumas recalled. “Roy went up there and sort of kissed off Shelton’s assignment, [which was] writing a story of a few short paragraphs.” Shelton took Reed for a customary coffee at Miller’s Cafe, across the alley from the Gazette, and “quietly chewed him out for doing his own thing.” Reed was soon covering “the race beat” for The New York Times.
“It was the pivotal event in Roy’s life, yet in his reminiscences in 2000 or so he grieved that he had wronged Shelton,” Dumas said. Reed also came to regret a line he wrote in the Gazette about Orval Faubus, the six-term Arkansas governor and subject of a full biography by Reed, “Faubus: The Life & Times of an American Prodigal.” “He said in the second paragraph [of the Gazette story] that Faubus had not told the truth,” Dumas recalled. “He seemed to regret that he had never told Faubus he was sorry, that he should have just matter-of-factly told what the truth was.”
Dumas said Reed was rarely aggressive. “Others could collect more facts; his strength was in telling the story.” Dumas agreed that Reed’s account of the 1965 Bloody Sunday attack by police and mounted posse members on marchers in Selma, Alabama, “had as much to do as anything with passage of the Voting Rights Act.” The writing was the key. “It was a dramatic piece that could not fail to arouse anyone who read it.”
Reed’s description of the melee appeared on the front page of The New York Times on March 8, 1965: “The troopers rushed forward, their blue uniforms and white helmets blurring into a flying wedge as they moved. The wedge moved with such force that it seemed almost to pass over the waiting column instead of through it. The first 10 or 20 Negroes were swept to the ground screaming, arms and legs flying, and packs and bags went skittering across the grassy divider strip and onto the pavement on both sides.”
Five months later, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law.
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