Roy Reed, who covered key events during the civil rights movement for the New York Times before returning to his native Arkansas to write and teach, died Dec. 10 at a hospital in Fayetteville, Ark. He was 87.
At the Times, he witnessed in 1965 what became known as “Bloody Sunday,” when state troopers and others beat black marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala.
“It sent a tidal wave of rage,” he later told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. “I guess people in the North knew bad things were happening in the South, but this they couldn’t avoid. It was right there on their television set, and it was so brutal.”
Mr. Reed covered the White House and worked in Times bureaus in New Orleans and London before leaving the paper in 1978. He returned to Arkansas, where he taught journalism at the University of Arkansas and wrote a biography of former Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, in addition to an autobiography and other published works.
Roy Earl Reed was born in Hot Springs, Ark., on Feb. 14, 1930, and grew up in Piney. He received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism at the University of Missouri and joined the Joplin Globe in Missouri and the Arkansas Gazette before landing at the Times. He also studied at Harvard University on a Nieman fellowship in the early 1960s.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Reed is survived by two children and five grandchildren.
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Remembering those who died in 2017.
