Bernice Johnson Reagon, a civil rights activist and singer with vocal groups including the Freedom Singers and Sweet Honey in the Rock, has died. She was 81.
Reagon's daughter, musician Toshi Reagon, announced the death in a public post on Facebook.
Reagon, a Georgia native, was born into a tradition of faith-driven activism. The daughter of a Baptist minister, at age 16 she studied music at Albany State University, a historically rich and prestigious university in Georgia, in the city where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would be arrested in 1962, sparking a national outcry. Many observers noted that the civil rights movement was intertwined with the musical traditions of black churches in the South.
The Freedom Singers—Charles Neblett, Rutha Mae Harris, Cordell Reagon, and Bernice Johnson Reagon—perform circa 1963.
(File photos/Getty Images)
“When you’re in the civil rights movement, it’s the first time you establish a relationship that’s pretty much the same as the one that used to drive Christians into the lion’s den,” Reagon told Terry Gross in an interview. “And then, for the first time, you understand those old songs in a way that no one could ever teach you.”
Reagon co-founded the Freedom Singers, an a cappella group affiliated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that engaged in direct-action protests such as the Freedom Rides and sit-ins at segregated restaurants. The Freedom Singers documented the group's ambitions and struggles in song, such as the moving song “They Laid Medgar Evers in His Grave.”
Bernice Johnson married Freedom Singers co-founder Cordell Reagon in 1963. They had two sons, Kwan and Toshi, before divorcing in 1967. In the early 1970s, she founded Sweet Honey in the Rock, an all-female a cappella group that would go on to receive three Grammy nominations and create a wide catalogue of spiritual and topical songs. The group's membership was designed to evolve over time, and Reagon retired in 2004.
Reagon was also an institutional voice for the study of black musical traditions, serving for many years as a professor of history at American University in Washington, D.C. Through the Smithsonian, she organized a festival in 1970, “Black Music Through the Languages of the New World,” and in 1972, she joined with other scholars to develop the African Diaspora Program. She also founded and directed the Program in Black American Culture at the National Museum of American History.
In 1994, he supervised the 26-part, Peabody Award-winning NPR documentary “Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions.”
His numerous honors in music and scholarship include a doctorate from Howard University, a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” and the Charles E. Frankel Award, Presidential Medal, from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Reagon is survived by his life partner, Adisa Douglas, his sons Toshi Reagon and Kwan Reagon, a grandson, Tashawn Nicole Reagon, and numerous extended family members.
