Bernice Johnson Reagon, whose powerful voice helped propel the Civil Rights Movement, has died

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Bernice Johnson Reagon, a musician and scholar who used her rich, powerful contralto voice in service of the American Civil Rights Movement and human rights struggles around the world, died on July 16, according to her daughter’s post on the social networks. She was 81 years old.

Reagon was probably best known as the founder of the internationally renowned African-American female a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, which she led from 1973 until her retirement in 2004. The Grammy-nominated group’s mission has been to educate and empower, as well how to entertain. They play music from a wide variety of genres that include spirituals, children’s songs, blues and jazz. Some of his original compositions pay homage to American civil rights leaders and international freedom movements, such as the fight against apartheid in South Africa.

“She was amazing,” said Tammy Kernodle, a distinguished professor of music at the University of Miami who specializes in African-American music. She described Reagon as someone “whose divine energy, intellect and talent intersect in such a way as to initiate changes in the atmosphere.”

Reagon’s musical activism began in the early 1960s when she served as field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and became an original member of its Freedom Singers, according to an obituary posted on social media by her daughter , musician Toshi Reagon. The group reunited and Toshi Reagon joined him to perform for then-President Barack Obama in 2010, as part of a series of White House performances that were also broadcast nationwide on public television.

Born in Dougherty County, outside Albany, Georgia, in 1942, Reagon participated in music workshops in the early 1960s at Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School, a training camp for activists. At a birthday reunion in 2007, Reagon explained how the school helped her see his musical heritage as something special.

“Ever since I was born, we always sang,” Reagon said. “When you’re within a culture and, let’s say, ‘doing what comes natural to you,’ you don’t pay attention to it. … I think my work as a cultural scholar and singer and songwriter would be completely different if I didn’t have someone drawing my attention to the people who use music to stay alive, or to stay together, or to raise the energy in a movement.”

While a student at Albany State College, Reagon was arrested for participating in a civil rights rally and expelled. She later graduated from Spellman College. She formed Sweet Honey in the Rock while a history student at Howard University and vocal director of the DC Black Repertory Company.

Reagon recorded her first solo album, “Folk Songs: The South,” with 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 asked to develop and curate a 1970 festival program, Black Music Through the Languages ​​of the New World, according to the Smithsonian. She went on to serve as curator of the African Diaspora Program and to found and direct the Black American Culture Program at the National Museum of American History, where she later served as curator emeritus. She has produced and performed on several Smithsonian Folkways recordings.

For a decade beginning in 1993, Reagon served as distinguished professor of history at American University in Washington, later becoming professor emeritus.

We assume that music has always been 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 from inside the church to the streets and to the cells. And they universalized these songs.”

“What she also did that was really important was historicize how music worked in the civil rights movement,” Kernodle added. “Her dissertation was one of the first real studies of civil rights music.”

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

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