“Then the sight of the man in the window, the expression of horror on his face.” “The first thing that hits you was the odor, burning flesh,” remembered Reed in one of his last living interviews for my book Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation, a nonfiction account of the fire. This was the Up Stairs Lounge fire, a notorious arson attack on a gay bar that would claim 32 lives. There, before a scorched canopy bearing the cursive words “Up Stairs,” Reed found a mob of drunken spectators and more than 100 police and firefighters, who were packing away hoses and craning down bodies from a bombed-out building. Reed raced in his car towards a smoldering, second-story bar perched on the edge of the French Quarter. His night editor on the national desk informed him of a deadly fire downtown, with multiple dead. In the late hours of Sunday, June 24, 1973, Roy Reed was jolted alert by a phone call from the Times Annex in New York City to his home on Upperline Street in Uptown New Orleans, two blocks off St. It’s so unjustly obscure that even Reed’s very worthy New York Times obituary failed to mention it. Reed’s journalistic contribution to queer history, conversely, remains unknown to most Americans. would join the next two Selma to Montgomery marches alongside the young activist John Lewis. 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. Clark, who complained of death threats on himself and his family by “Negro extremist groups.”
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. We won't force you to come to the rescheduled date, we will get your money right back to you without hassle.The 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. If any of our events need to be cancelled or postponed for any reason, all tickets holders will have the option for a refund.
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