Bernice Johnson Reagon, whose powerful voice advanced the civil rights movement, has died

NASHVILLE, Tennessee – Bernice Johnson Reagon, a musician and scholar who lent her rich, powerful contralto voice to the American civil rights movement and the human rights struggle around the world, died July 16, according to a social media post by her daughter. She was 81.

Reagon was probably best known as the founder of the internationally known African-American a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, which she led from 1973 until her departure in 2004. The Grammy-nominated group’s mission is to educate and empower as well as entertain. They perform songs from a wide range of genres, including spirituals, children’s songs, blues and jazz. Some of their original compositions honor American civil rights leaders and international freedom movements such as the fight against apartheid in South Africa.

“She was incredible,” said Tammy Kernodle, a distinguished music professor at Miami University who specializes in African-American music. She described Reagon as someone “whose divine energy, intellect and talent intersect in such a way that they create a change in the atmosphere.”

Reagon’s musical involvement began in the early 1960s, when she worked as a field secretary for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and became a founding member of the Freedom Singers, according to an obituary posted on social media by her daughter, musician Toshi Reagon. The group reunited, and Toshi Reagon performed for then-President Barack Obama in 2010 as part of a White House concert series that was also broadcast nationally on public television.

Reagon was born in 1942 in Dougherty County outside Albany, Georgia, and attended music workshops at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, a training school for activists, in the early 1960s. At an anniversary event in 2007, Reagon explained how the school helped her see her musical heritage as special.

“We’ve always sung since I was born,” Reagon said. “When you live in a culture and, quote, ‘do what comes naturally to you,’ you don’t pay attention to it. … I think my work as a cultural scholar, singer and composer would be very different if no one had pointed out to me the people who use song to stay alive, to hold themselves together, or to increase the energy of a movement.”

While attending Albany State College, Reagon was arrested and expelled for participating in a civil rights demonstration. She later graduated from Spellman College. While studying history at Howard University and serving as vocal director of the DC Black Repertory Company, she founded Sweet Honey in the Rock.

Reagon recorded her first solo album, Folk Songs: The South, on Folkways Records in 1965. In 1966, she became a founding member of the Atlanta-based Harambee Singers.

Reagon began working with the Smithsonian Institution in 1969, when she was invited to develop and curate a festival program for 1970 called “Black Music Through the Languages ​​​​of the New World,” according to the Smithsonian. She then curated the African Diaspora Program and founded and directed the Program in Black American Culture at the National Museum of American History, where she later served as curator emeritus. She produced and performed on numerous Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.

Beginning in 1993, Reagon served for a decade as Distinguished Professor of History at American University in Washington, later becoming Professor Emeritus.

We assume that music was always a part of civil rights activism, Kernodle said, but it was people like Reagon who made music “part of the strategy of nonviolent resistance. … They took these songs, they took these practices out of the church and into the streets and into the prison cells. And they made these songs universal.”

“She also made it very important that she historicized the function of this music in the civil rights movement,” Kernodle added. “Her dissertation was one of the first real studies of civil rights music.”

Reagon is the recipient of two George F. Peabody Awards, including for her work as principal scholar, conceptual producer, and host of the Smithsonian Institution and National Public Radio series “Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions.”

She has also received the Charles E. Frankel Prize and the Presidential Medal for outstanding contributions to the public understanding of the humanities, an award from the MacArthur Fellows Program, and the Trumpet of Conscience Award from the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change.