Roy Reed, Times Reporter Who Covered the Civil Rights Era, Dies at 87 - The New York Times

Jim Dwyer writes

"‪Roy Reed, reporter, was near Meredith when he got shot, at the Selma jailhouse when King walked out, at the Pettus Bridge when blacks were bull whipped and clubbed. He would’ve been called fake news but he was the real deal. Don’t miss the John Schwartz obit "

When Dwyer, himself the "real deal",  uses the honorific "reporter" it reminds us of the heroics of the men and women, writers and photographers,  who bring us the stories of life and death, suffering and beauty around the world.
Roy Reed, Times Reporter Who Covered the Civil Rights Era, Dies at 87 - The New York Times
by John Schwartz

In “The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation,” Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff wrote that Mr. Reed “could write magically, choosing words that caught your eye.” Mr. 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.”

Mr. Reed, in a memoir, “Beware of Limbo Dancers: A Correspondent’s Adventures with The New York Times,” wrote that “Speaking Southern was not just a matter of drawl or twang; it meant a different way of framing thoughts.” It meant that he understood the territory, even as he was appalled by the racism and violence that undergirded the suppression of voting rights.

Roy Earl Reed was born on Feb. 14, 1930, in Hot Springs, Ark., 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 his memoir, he said that working in the store as a boy and talking to a black customer, Leroy Samuels, about the injustice of segregation helped awaken him from “generations of family prejudice lying not quite dormant in my young mind.”