"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 on to the pavement on both sides.
"Those still on their feet retreated.
"The troopers continued pushing, using both the force of their bodies and the prodding of their nightsticks.
"A cheer went up from the white spectators lining the south side of the highway."
---^---
That was Roy Reed, reporting from the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965, as more than 500 civil rights protesters attempted to march from Selma, Ala., to Montgomery. The news story was published in The New York Times on March 8.
That was, to use a cliche, the first draft of history.
I acknowledge using a cliche and do so reluctantly. Roy Reed would, at least verbally, flay the skin off me or any student of his who dared to lazily use cliches or any other sort of contrivance to avoid thinking. I confess to having lost some skin, but only my share as a novice and never unjustly.
I was a novice in journalism, green as the proverbial grass, when I walked into Roy Reed's class in the Journalism Department at the University of Arkansas. Reed taught News Reporting II and I wasn't all that interested. I was a "non-traditional" student, having dropped out of college once, enlisted in the Army, and worked at a series of jobs in furniture factories that dotted central Arkansas in the 1970s.
I was bored and tired so I went back to school, declaring myself a pre-law major with little interest and no ambition for a future in journalism. There was nothing of consequence to this newspaper stuff. It was just a collection of courses to get me through four years of undergraduate study. I did the work -- and got all A grades -- but wasn't part of the eager young students who flocked to class and then to work on The Traveler, the student newspaper. I had an attitude. I had plans.
Roy Reed changed that. He changed me and he changed my life.
Reed poked at and prodded me. He questioned my work and challenged me to think. He didn't care what I thought. So far as I know, few instructors did. Most instructors I encountered wanted their students to show a quiet level of minimal competence in repeating what they were reading from the frayed and yellowed pages of their 20-year-old notes. But Roy Reed was damn well going to see some evidence of thought in what I did as one of his students.
Back in the day, journalism students were a sneaky lot who thought they were much too clever for their aging instructors. There were ways, passed down from one level to the next, of avoiding difficult or time-consuming assignments and also an unspoken agreement that no one would rock the boat or make the rest look bad by working too hard. That wouldn't get you invited to drink beer on Dickson Street.
Reed assigned the class the task of reporting on a Fayetteville City Board of Directors meeting. As the directors droned on and the citizens made their speeches to the public access television cameras, the audience of students thinned out. There was another unspoken agreement that the stories turned in would be reflections of whatever took up the most time.
For some reason, I was the only one who stayed to the end. After hours of talk of herbicides, pesticides and incinerators, the board debated a request from a businessman who wanted to start up a taxicab service and needed a franchise agreement with the city. I thought that was interesting so I wrote my story with that as the lead. The next day, during a break between classes, the other News Reporting II students persuaded me to change my story to conform to theirs with something about a rezoning as the lead.
The assignments were turned in and a weekend intervened between that class and the next. It was a day of reckoning, but with no outward sign of that until we were all seated.
"Every single one of you failed in your assignment," Reed boomed at us. If a pin had dropped we would have run for the nearest bomb shelter. "None of you understood why you were there and what your job as a reporter is. The news isn't about who talks the longest or the loudest. The news is what is important to the people in your community."
He paused and stared down at me from Mount Olympus.
"One of you had the story right," he said as he bored a hole in my forehead. "But you changed it. You changed it so you'd have the same story as everyone else. But everyone else missed the lead. What was the story, Tom?"
Pinned to my chair, unable to escape, I mumbled something about the taxi service.
"Yes," he thundered. "Aside from the few people directly involved, no one is going to care about a rezoning. People who live and work in this town who may need transportation will all be interested in a new taxi service."
Roy Reed took me aside not long after that class. He told me he thought I had the instincts of a good reporter but I had to trust those instincts. He also told me I needed to write. He sent me over to The Traveler offices where I was put on the staff. After graduation many of us were looking for work with little success. As I walked down the basement hallway one afternoon, Reed called me into his office and asked how the job search was going. He already knew. He handed me a note with a name and phone number on it.
"Call Tom Parsons in Pine Bluff," Reed said. "They need a police reporter and I told him you could do it."
I made the call. I got the job. I left law school plans on the shelf and I have never regretted it.
I have reported on crime and death, on politics and government. I have talked for endless hours with politicians and prison inmates. I have written stories on county fairs and countywide floods.
Roy Reed's death was reported in Monday's newspaper. I prefer to think that he's taken on another assignment.
Reed thought he saw something in me. God only knows what or why. I have done my best to deserve that. I have made mistakes over the years. Those mistakes are mine and the blame for them rests with me. If I have done anything right, done my job as a reporter as it should be done, credit Roy Reed.
I do. Thank you, Mr. Reed and -30-
NW News on 12/13/2017