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

Bernice Johnson Reagon, an influential American civil rights activist who fought against racism with her stirring alto voice and lyrics, died on Tuesday at the age of 81.

The activist’s death was announced on Facebook by her daughter, musician Toshi Reagon.

“As a scientist, singer, composer, organizer and activist, Dr. Reagon has spent over half a century speaking out against racism and systemic inequalities in the United States and around the world,” said her daughter Toshi.

The cause of death was not 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 major meetings she helped organize in Albany, 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. One of the best known of the Johnson Among the compositions the group performed were “Ella’s Song,” with its driving chorus – “We who believe in freedom cannot rest, we who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes” – as well as 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.

(With contributions from Reuters)