Bernice Johnson Reagon, singer and US civil rights activist, dies at the age of 81

GEORGIA, July 18 – Bernice Johnson Reagon, an American civil rights activist who fought against racism with her stirring alto voice and lyrics, died on Tuesday (July 16) at the age of 81, her daughter said yesterday.

“As a scientist, singer, composer, organizer and activist, Dr. Reagon spoke out against racism and systemic inequalities in the United States and around the world for over half a century,” said her daughter Toshi Reagon, who like her mother is a musician and activist, when she announced her death on Facebook.

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No cause of death was given.

Born in Dougherty County, Georgia, in 1942, she became involved in the civil rights movement at Albany State College in Georgia, a historically black educational institution that is now a university, according to a biography on her website.

Reagon was a member of the original Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee Freedom Singers, founded in 1962. The Freedom Singers performed to raise money for SNCC projects and mobilize activists.

An online SNCC archive quotes Reagon describing her early work. At one of the first large meetings in Albany, which she helped organize, she was asked to lead a song and began an African-American spiritual: “Over my head I see trouble in the air.” She replaced “trouble” with “freedom” and said that “by the second line, everyone was singing along.”

In 1973, she founded Sweet Honey in the Rock, an a cappella group of African-American women. Among the most famous compositions performed by the group was Ella’s song, with its driving refrain – “We who believe in freedom cannot rest, we who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes” – and other lines inspired by the speeches of another civil rights pioneer, Ella Baker. Ella’s song can still be heard at demonstrations today.

She was also a musicologist and studied African-American spirituals. She was professor emerita of history at American University and curator emerita at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.