Roy Reed, Professor Emeritus of Journalism, Dies at Age 87

Roy Reed

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – He loved anecdotal leads and fiercely despised false titles.

Roy Reed, a professor of journalism for 16 years and the foremost journalist covering the Civil Rights movement during the mid-1960s, died Sunday evening at Washington Regional Medical Center. He was 87.

Reed grew up in the town of Piney, near Hot Springs, attended Ouachita Baptist College for a year and then earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

In 1952, he married Norma Pendleton of El Dorado. They had two children, Cindy and John.

Reed worked for the Joplin Globe in Missouri for three years before being hired by the Arkansas Gazette in 1956, where he covered the North Little Rock city government and then the administration of Gov. Orval Faubus. He took a brief break to accept a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, where he studied the history of socialism and populism in the South.

In early 1965, The New York Times hired him to cover the South and within the month sent him to Selma, Alabama, where he covered the release of Martin Luther King Jr. from jail and then the “Bloody Sunday” march by civil rights protesters who were met by Alabama state troopers with night sticks, backed up by volunteer posse members on horseback. Reed’s front-page stories described for the rest of America the atrocities being carried out by the state government against its African American citizens.

“It sent a tidal wave of rage,” Reed told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in 2015. “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.”

He later covered the White House and the unsuccessful presidential campaign of Vice President Hubert Humphrey, before being assigned overseas to head up The Times news bureau in London. All told, Reed wrote more than 1,300 bylined articles in The New York Times.

In 1978, Reed retired from The Times and moved his family back to Arkansas, settling just south of Fayetteville in the remote village of Hogeye, where architect Fay Jones designed the Reeds a home in the vernacular of an Ozark barn.

Gene Foreman, an Arkansas journalist who followed a career arc similar to Reed’s, described hearing about Reed’s decision to return home: “I remember his saying once that he woke up in a hotel somewhere in the world and didn’t know where he was (it was Dublin), and he decided then it was time to come home. He retired from The Times after trying in vain to get The Timesto move its bureau from New Orleans to Hogeye.”

The next year, Reed began teaching journalism at the University of Arkansas.

“Roy Reed was an amazing journalist who reported on our country during one of its most pivotal times, and as such he was a national treasure,” said Todd Shields, dean of the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, home to the journalism program. “He also bettered the lives of countless students, ensuring future generations will have his care and dedication to the art and craft of journalism. This is a great loss, but his legacy and his writing will live on.”

His teaching consistently included courses in feature writing and news reporting, but it didn’t seem to matter what he taught.

“He was one of those teachers that good students take a class from, not because of the class, but because of Roy,” said Rick Stockdell, director of KUAF and associate professor of journalism. “I had lots of broadcast students ask me about taking a class from him because they had heard about him from other students.”

One of Reed’s students, alumnus Tyler Treadway, recalled two pragmatic pieces of advice offered by Reed. The first was that a reporter should arrive 4 minutes early for an interview. “Any earlier and you’ll appear over-anxious; any later and you’ll appear lackadaisical.” The second was the James Meredith Rule: “Keep a candy bar and some water in your glove compartment.”

That second bit of advice stemmed from the time that Reed covered the march of James Meredith in 1966. Meredith first made news in 1962 when violence broke out as he tried to enroll as the first African American student at the University of Mississippi. Four years later, Meredith planned to walk from Memphis deep into Mississippi to protest discrimination. Before getting too far, though, a sniper shot Meredith in the back.

Reed’s editor in New York, Claude Sitton, thumbed through the wire photos coming to the newspaper from Memphis and then watched the news coming across TV sets in the newsroom. Sitton began asking, “Where’s Roy Reed?”

Reed and several other reporters had stopped briefly at a store to get a coke and snack, missing the biggest moment of the day. Reed scrambled to get the first-day story and then redeemed himself the next day by getting the first interview with Meredith in the hospital. Nevertheless, he endured ribbing back in New York. Forty years later, students turned “Where’s Roy Reed?” into a Where’s Waldo sort of fundraiser for the annual Journalism Days. Print lasts forever.

Don Troop grew up in the same neck of Arkansas woods as Reed but a generation later. He’s now an editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education and recalled Reed offering advice to students: “He told us that ‘the best reporters have a bit of “hick” in them.’ I was always slow on the uptake, and didn’t really get it at first. But after a few years of working in journalism I realized the wisdom of those words. When you walk into an interview thinking you already know the entire backstory, you deny your sources an opportunity to simply tell it in a way that a fifth-grader can understand. If sources think they are addressing a simpleton, they’ll speak at a very basic level — no jargon, no euphemism, no coded language — and sometimes they’ll even let down their guard and tell you more than they intended.”

Reed served briefly as chair of the journalism department in 1981 while waiting for a new departmental chair, Bob Douglas, to be interviewed and hired.

Another student from the period, Stephen Steed, said, “I cannot think of Roy Reed without also thinking of Bob Douglas. Both of them worked hard, often behind the scenes, to help their students, never letting the bureaucracy of a university or newspaper get in the way of a job or career.”

Reed joined the journalism faculty just as the first computers were being introduced to the department, a shift that hit some faculty members more abruptly than others.

Patsy Watkins, an associate professor of journalism, recalled that Reed “rescued” several typewriters from the department’s Sanders Reporting Lab when the lab was converted to computers. They were set side-by-side in a row across his office floor, tipped up onto their backs with keys reaching into the air like a row of dogs lying on their backs and paws stretched outward.

“As a faculty member with Roy, I took those typewriters to symbolize his dedication to the traditional standards of shoe leather reporting and writing with conciseness and style,” Watkins said. “It was Roy’s style to make a statement in a way that was simple and profound and quirky; it made you smile but also cautioned you about assuming journalism was changing just because the technology was.”

His connections and friendships in the traditional newspaper industry brought well known Pulitzer Prize-winning speakers to campus such as David Halberstam and Harrison Salisbury.

None of the day-to-day academic chores, though, stopped him from writing.

He published four books through the University of Arkansas Press — Looking for Hogeye in 1986, Orval Faubus: The Life and Times of an American Prodigal in 1997, Looking Back at the Arkansas Gazette in 2009 and Beware of Limbo Dancers: A Correspondent’s Adventures with The New York Times in 2012, which won the Porter Prize that year.

“The Faubus biography was so definitive, and it is an important part of Roy’s legacy because it documents an era in Arkansas history,” said Foreman. “Roy spent hours interviewing a cooperative Orval, and Norma transcribed the tapes, blushing often at Orval’s profanity. Among other things, the book supplied details on Faubus’ attendance at Commonwealth College, which Francis Cherry made central to their 1954 runoff campaign for governor.”

Larry Foley, chair of the School of Journalism and Strategic Media, collaborated with Reed on the Orval Faubus interviews. He recalled his first meeting with Reed: “I met Roy during my faculty job interview in winter of 1993. Roy and the late professor Bob Carey took me to lunch, and while listening to those two salty journalists spin yarns and laugh at their own stories, I thought quietly, ‘I’ve just got to land this job. What a treat to get to work alongside these characters.'”

Foley filmed the interviews of Faubus, and they were turned into a program for public television called The Governor from Greasy Creek.

“Roy, by just being himself, taught me many lessons,” Foley said. “I learned over the years that he was a demanding, gifted teacher. And his students loved him. The lesson: Teach them what they need to know, and in time, they’ll appreciate that you invested in them, earning their love and respect.”

While freelancing articles for magazines and often for The Times, Reed also conducted more than three dozen oral history interviews for the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History. He also interviewed Arkansas’ preeminent architect, Fay Jones, nearly every week for three years, learning about his design philosophy and the buildings he created.

“Over the years, Roy taught me a lot about having pride in Arkansas for all the right reasons,” said Gerald Jordan, an associate professor of journalism and close friend of the Reeds. “He’s over there as the London bureau representing Arkansas, just by being Roy. And that was a difficult time to be from Arkansas because the shadow of Little Rock loomed worldwide.”

At the time that Reed was living in England, if someone outside Arkansas knew anything about Arkansas, it was that the state had called out the National Guard to prevent integration of Central High School.

“The thing that impressed me most about Roy was how proudly and continually he embraced Arkansas. The farther away he got from this place the more he reached back to this place. I think it’s also fair to say the farther his orbit got from Arkansas, the deeper his accent got.”

This story originally appeared in the University of Arkansas’ Newswire publication. Please visit news.uark.edu for more stories like this.