Wood isn’t one to let an opportunity slip through his fingers. “I ain’t from the land of dreams,” he told me this past fall. He was raised in Memphis, Tenn., and Birmingham, Ala., and his father was Roy Wood Sr., a radio-journalism pioneer who reported on Black platoons in Vietnam, South African apartheid and the civil rights movement for the Black Chicago radio station WVON before helping found the National Black Network, the first Black-owned radio news service, where he was the news director. His mother, Joyce Dugan, was a respected teacher. Though his parents were highly regarded in the community, Wood’s childhood was sometimes shaped by a sense of scarcity and limitation. “We were raised by people who were fortunate to be able to vote, to drink from the same water fountain,” Wood said. “They were so exhausted from that battle that all they wanted was a house and a fair wage. The idea of dreaming beyond that was not commonplace, and in a lot of instances it was frowned upon. In the South, you dare to dream beyond the horizon.”
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