A New Orleans Gay Bar Inferno Killed 32. Roy Reed Was First to Report the Truth.
Jack Thornell/APThe late journalist and New Orleans resident Roy Reed, who passed away in 2017, is perhaps best known for his enterprising Civil Rights-era coverage in The New York Times, including a March 1965 attack of state troopers on unarmed marchers in Selma, Alabama at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. In his front-page Times story of the ensuing carnage, known as Bloody Sunday, Reed boldly wrote of white troopers who “tore through column of Negro demonstrators with tear gas, nightsticks and whips.” The New Orleans Times-Picayune, by comparison, paired newswire coverage of the Selma attack with a sympathetic story of offending lawman Sheriff James G. Clark, who complained of death threats on himself and his family by “Negro extremist groups.”Roy Reed’s special report of Bloody Sunday at Selma would ignite sympathy for Black Freedom causes and help speed political passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would join the next two Selma to Montgomery marches alongside the young activist John Lewis. Reed’s journalistic contribution to queer history, conversely, remains unknown to most Americans. It’s so unjustly obscure that even Reed’s very worthy New York Times obituary failed to mention it.Read more at The Daily Beast.
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