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

Her daughter, singer and musician Toshi Reagon, confirmed the death but did not give a specific cause of death.

Dr. Reagon has worked for decades at the intersection of music and activism, promoting Black history and culture as a scholar, artist, composer, and producer. She received a PhD in history from Howard University, taught as a professor at American University, worked as a curator at the Smithsonian Institution, and researched the development of African American church music through books and radio programs, including the Peabody Award-winning NPR program “Wade in the Water,” which she created and hosted in 1994.

“My ancestors carefully wrapped my story in the songs of church, work and the blues,” she wrote in the liner notes to her 1965 solo album Folk Songs: The South, describing a moment of self-revelation. “Since that discovery, I have tried to find myself, using the first music I ever knew as the basis for my search for truth.”

The daughter of a Baptist minister, Dr. Reagon came of age protesting segregation in her hometown of Albany, Georgia. Albany was a white supremacist stronghold that attracted the attention of organizers such as the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. When the Albany Movement began in November 1961, she was only 19 years old and a student at Albany State College. But she soon earned a reputation as a gifted organizer and artist. She went to prison for her activism and sang spirituals and protest songs that encouraged her colleagues in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

When she was asked to lead the group in singing at one of the movement’s first mass meetings, she began with a well-known spiritual – “Over my head I see trouble in the air” – but then decided the lyrics were not appropriate for the occasion. On the spur of the moment, she swapped “trouble” for “freedom.”

“By the second line,” she remembers, “everyone was singing along.”

Even experienced activists felt refreshed by the music.

“I remember you lifting your beautiful black head and standing erect on your feet. Your lips trembled as the melodic words, ‘Above my head I see freedom in the air,’ came forth with an urgency and pain that evoked a feeling of intense renewal and devotion to liberation,” SNCC organizer James Forman wrote in his 1972 memoir, “The Making of Black Revolutionaries.”

“Your pain and sorrow were the torment of the people,” he added, “and you comforted us all.”

While the movement in Albany failed to desegregate the city’s public spaces, it served as a testing ground for civil rights tactics and strategies and demonstrated the power of protest songs. In late 1962, Dr. Reagon – then known as Bernice Johnson – along with three other musician-activists formed the Freedom Singers, a choir that toured in a Buick station wagon and performed in churches, concert halls, college campuses, and cafes in support of SNCC and the movement.

The original lineup included Rutha Mae Harris, Charles Neblett and Cordell Reagon, a tenor who had joined the civil rights struggle in Nashville and married Dr. Reagon in 1963. The group played at the Newport Folk Festival and the March on Washington that year and appeared alongside artists Harry Belafonte and Thelonious Monk at a benefit concert at Carnegie Hall. Toshi Seeger, the wife of folk singer Pete Seeger, helped the ensemble book performances; she also became the godmother and namesake of Dr. Reagon’s daughter.

“People were always asking, ‘We need help: Can the Freedom Singers come to Nashville?’ ‘Can they come to Atlanta?’ ‘Can they come to an SNCC meeting in McComb, Mississippi?'” said author and civil rights historian Taylor Branch, who described Dr. Reagon as “the organizing force” of the group.

“Music was vital,” he added in a telephone interview. “It is the language of pure emotion, and people can make themselves do things they wouldn’t otherwise do by singing it.”

Dr. Reagon, a contralto, compared the Freedom Singers to a “singing newspaper” that publicized the civil rights movement through stories she and the other singers interspersed with songs such as “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round” and “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize” (“Paul and Silas were in jail and had no money to get out on bail”).

Although the original lineup disbanded after a few years, Dr. Reagon continued to sing, forming an a cappella group in Atlanta called the Harambee Singers before creating Sweet Honey in the Rock, an all-female, black ensemble that mixed popular genres with traditional music, received three Grammy nominations, and toured the world.

The group was formed in 1973 when Dr. Reagon was working as vocal director for the DC Black Repertory Company. The group’s name comes from a song title that was also a metaphor, symbolizing the strength and sweetness of black women in general and the group’s members in particular. Their music addressed black history and political oppression in a genre-bending format that was “less eclectic than electric, a mix of pain, joy and affirmation,” wrote Washington Post journalist Richard Harrington.

For Dr. Reagon, who retired as the group’s leader in 2004, the ensemble’s music reflected an insight she had gained while performing at mass gatherings as a teenager. Singing in churches, living rooms and other informal gatherings, she discovered that “culture is not a luxury, not a pastime, not entertainment,” she said, “but the lifeblood of a community.”

Bernice Johnson, the third of eight children, was born near Albany on Oct. 4, 1942. Her father was an itinerant preacher and self-taught carpenter who built the family’s rural home. Her mother cared for the family and “pushed us to reach for a higher level,” Dr. Reagon told The Post in 1987. “She always saw that we could work in another world with more opportunities. She pledged her life to make sure we had the chance to do that.”

While studying music at Albany State College, now a university, Dr. Reagon became the leader of the local junior chapter of the NAACP. Her subsequent activism, which culminated in her arrest in 1961, led to her suspension from the college.

“It also brought my first real decision for myself,” she recalled, “and I found that I had the ability to think for myself. I began to question who I was, what I was doing here, what was really behind the fear and atrocities that black people had to endure.” She found answers after enrolling at Spelman College in Atlanta and turning to the spirituals she had learned in the Baptist church as a child.

Dr. Reagon dropped out of Spelman to tour with the Freedom Singers, but later returned to complete her bachelor’s degree in history in 1970. She moved to Washington the following year and earned her doctorate from Howard in 1975.

By this time, she was already working at the Smithsonian, where she developed a program on the African diaspora for the Folklife Festival, moved to the National Museum of American History as a curator, and eventually served on the scientific advisory board of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. In 1989, she received a MacArthur Fellowship for “Geniuses” and in 1995 was awarded the Charles Frankel Prize in the Humanities by President Bill Clinton.

Her marriage to Cordell Reagon ended in divorce in 1967. In addition to her daughter, who collaborated with her on musical projects, including an opera adaptation of “Parable of the Sower,” the post-apocalyptic novel by Octavia E. Butler, she leaves behind Dr. Reagon’s partner Adisa Douglas, with whom she lived for about thirty years, a son, Kwan Reagon, two brothers, two sisters and a granddaughter.

During her solo performances or with Sweet Honey, Dr. Reagon often invited audiences to sing with her. For example, she sang the gospel song “Lord, Remember Me” at her commencement address at Barnard College in 2001.

In her speech, she urged the graduates to fight sexism – “I come with a burden,” she declared, “because we still live in a culture where one of the first things women learn is to be afraid of being a woman” – and to do something worth remembering, in a nod to the song she began with.

“When you live your life in such a way that your actions change the space in which you operate,” she said, “that is a kind of request to be remembered.”