Bernice Johnson Reagon;
Bernice Johnson Reagon; Credit: Sharon Farmer

Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon knew the power of song. She learned it singing in her childhood Baptist church. Later, as an activist in the civil rights movement, her songs helped to change the world.

“Song was a way of giving people courage,” says Karen Spellman, who first met Reagon in Atlanta in 1967 and remained a lifelong friend. “That was Bernice’s tradition from the beginning. And I believe she carried that and remembered that throughout all of the work that she did … whether it was in civil rights or the women’s movement, the social justice movement … [or] the pan-Africanist movement. Her prime motivational factor was to get people to do something.”

Reagon, who died July 16 at the age of 81, was widely admired as one of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee Freedom Singers, who performed at the historic 1963 March on Washington and at countless other events that rallied activists and support for the civil rights movement. She went on to found and lead the acclaimed Washington-based Black women’s activist a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock. In 1974, Reagon created and led the National Museum of American History’s program in African American culture, where she played a crucial role in reshaping the Smithsonian’s institutional approach to documenting and presenting Black American history and culture. 

For Secretary of the Smithsonian Lonnie Bunch, also the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Reagon’s contributions in multiple realms were immeasurable. “We have lost a lighthouse. … We’ve lost someone who challenged us to understand culture, challenged us to make America better, and challenged us to understand race and gender,” Bunch says. “Bernice is that kind of figure, a lens to understanding the last 50 years … to understand how young people stood up to demand freedom during the civil rights movement. She’s a lens to understand the role of music, both as a bulwark during the civil rights movement, but also a way to communicate African American culture.”

Throughout her life, Reagon was driven by a sense of purpose that informed her work as a singer and composer, a scholar and cultural historian, and as an educator, activist, and curator. Her list of accomplishments and achievements seem endless; over the years, she amassed countless recognitions, including the MacArthur Foundation Genius Award and the Presidential Medal for Contribution to Public Understanding of the Humanities. Reagan also received the Peabody Award for her visionary work on the National Public Radio/Smithsonian Folkways “Wade in the Water” series and 4-CD boxed set of African American sacred music. 

Richard Harrington, a former Washington Post music critic, profiled Reagon in 1987. He  remembers her “remarkable impact,” telling City Paper, “I cannot emphasize what a towering figure she was. She was a giant of her time. Wherever she went, in whatever context, she was a creator and a catalyst and a historian who was … a galvanizer for racial and social justice.

“Bernice kept her eyes on the prize, and the prize was freedom, the prize was equality, opportunity,” Harrington says. “For that, we are so blessed to have had her as part of the heart and soul of Washington for so long.”

Reagon grew up just outside Albany in Southwest Georgia, where her father served as a preacher. In the family’s Baptist church, there was no piano or organ; instead, parishioners sang a cappella. The rhythm section was the congregation’s hands and feet and, occasionally, a tambourine. 

Her activism started at a young age. Reagon was 16 when she began her undergraduate studies at Albany State College, where she helped form a chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She also became a field secretary for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, a youth-led organization that coordinated grassroots campaigns against segregation. In 1962, after being arrested for her role in civil rights protests, Reagon was expelled from Albany State. That year, she became a founding member of the SNCC Freedom Singers, performing alongside Cordell Reagon, who she would later marry. 

With the Freedom Singers, Reagon deepened her understanding of music’s power in the fight for racial justice. “Her method of organizing in the civil rights movement became that of singing, using her song tradition that had been developed over the years,” says Spellman. “Bernice took those methods into the Freedom Singers, and they evolved into a really important organization as national spokespersons for the movement in the north.” 

During most of the 1960s, the Freedom Singers sang traditional and well-known gospel songs, frequently revising the lyrics to create what they called “freedom songs.” Whether participating in civil rights marches or warehoused in southern jails, activists who were already familiar with the songs could easily sing along. 

“Song was used to motivate people into community action, into going down to the register to vote in places where they couldn’t register before, or get in a march that was going to surely turn into a violent situation because the police were not going to let them march,” says Spellman.

Reagon moved to Washington in 1973 to earn her doctoral degree at Howard University. She also became the vocal director of the D.C. Black Repertory Company, organizing vocal workshops that inspired her to create Sweet Honey in the Rock. Reagon led the group, which received great acclaim, until her retirement in 2003. For longtime local gospel singer Yasmeen Williams, who first saw Sweet Honey perform at the 1975 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, joining the ensemble in 1976 felt like coming home. “They were singing together on a makeshift front porch, and I looked at them and I saw myself,” she says. “There’s no money, no gold, that can touch that.”

In 1974, after years of collaboration with Folklife Festival co-founder Ralph Rinzler and others, Reagon founded and directed the National Museum of American History’s Program in Black Culture. She also co-curated the Folklife Festival’s African Diaspora Program, and produced and performed on numerous Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. 

James Early, who formerly worked at the Smithsonian Folklife Center as both the assistant secretary for education and public service and director of cultural heritage policy, first met Reagon in 1967 when he was studying at Morehouse College and she was at Spelman College following her expulsion from Albany State. They both received five-year Ford Foundation doctoral fellowships to study at Howard University. Later, at the Smithsonian, Early watched Reagon bring her methodology to an institution that historically had not always valued the cultural contributions of Black Americans. 

“The major impact that she had on the Smithsonian was bringing community in as colleagues. [This] impacted the basic mandate of the Smithsonian, which is increasing diffusion of knowledge, which meant new scholars, both from community and those who had formal training. It meant new research, it meant new collections based on their research out of which new exhibitions and new interpretive perspectives could be bought,” says Early.

Bunch, who continued to work with Reagon over the years, credits her for supporting and challenging him, especially as he worked to create the National Museum of African American History and Culture. “She continued to play that role for me as someone who was a voice of what was possible, who was demanding that excellence, but who by her very nature made us better by the questions she asked,” he says. 

Former acting director of Smithsonian Folkways and longtime arts activist Amy Horowitz worked and traveled with Reagon and Sweet Honey from 1977 to 1994 and remained a lifelong friend. Horowitz collaborated with Reagon to reissue several of the singer’s early albums. In 1978, Horowitz and Reagon formed Roadwork, a multiracial women’s arts coalition. In addition to coordinating tours for Sweet Honey and Reagon, Roadwork created Sisterfire, a local women’s festival held annually from 1982 to 1989. Sisterfire foregrounded women of color, many of them queer, at a time when LGBTQIA Black and brown women were not always welcome in mainstream arts venues. 

Toshi Reagon, daughter of Bernice Johnson Reagon, in the late ’80s; credit: Darrow Montgomery

In 2018, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival hosted a Sisterfire reunion. Curated by Reagon’s daughter Toshi Reagon, a highly regarded artist in her own right, the reunion showcased past artists as well as a new generation of artist-activists. The Bernice Johnson Reagon Songbook set was its centerpiece. 

Last year, Horowitz and Early wrote an essay for the Journal of American Folklore that called for further academic study of Reagon’s scholarly and activist work. “For me, writing this article with James was a way to stay true to something that Bernice had always said to me,” says Horowitz, before quoting Reagon: “‘If you feel something is missing, it’s probably the sound of your own voice.’ [The essay] was a way to invite in future generations of artists, activists, and scholars to further her ongoing legacy. In this way, the essay calls and responds to her congregational teaching.” 

For many DMV residents who encountered Reagon in her role as a history professor at American University, via her various capacities at the Smithsonian, or as a member of Sweet Honey’s sprawling congregation—her local presence was a gift. Bunch cherished the impromptu conversations he would have with Reagon whenever he would bump into her at various Howard events or at Politics and Prose. “Her generosity of sharing ideas and the importance of history—people benefited from that all the time,” he says. 

Writer and literary activist E. Ethelbert Miller contributed liner notes for the 1997 reissue of Reagon’s 1975 album, Give Your Hands to Struggle: The Evolution of a Freedom Fighter. Reagon returned the favor by writing a blurb for his 1994 poetry collection, First Light: New and Selected Poems. Years ago, Miller heard Reagon sing at the funeral of a close friend at First Congregational Church. “Bernice sang a song that I had heard at a Sweet Honey in the Rock concert, but now I’m listening to her sing this song in a church. She is singing to that family, and I realized that she is taking this song and she is healing that family with her voice,” he recalls. “Now maybe what I’m experiencing is what those folks who were in the civil rights protests, and they’re locked up in a jail with Bernice, and Bernice is singing in that jail cell [experienced].

“All I know is that I heard this woman singing at a funeral, and I realized that even if I’ve heard those songs before, something is happening. This woman is a medium. This woman is tied into something much larger,” Miller continues. “This is not just a performance. This is where that song and her voice call you to do something. You get moved, and you realize how powerful music can be.”

Niani Kilkenny formerly served as director of the Museum of American History’s program in African American Culture and has also been a longtime member of In Process, a community offshoot of Sweet Honey in the Rock. As she mourns the loss of her friend, she, like many others, finds herself using Reagon’s language of love and resilience. “Now that she has transitioned. I don’t have words, I have to rely on hers when she sings, ‘I remember, that’s why I believe,’” says Kilkenny, referring to Reagon’s song “I Remember, I Believe.”

“Remembering is what she did,” Kilkenny says. “She was a historian remembering and connecting the past with the present for the future, and she did in a way that grounded truth and history, and memory and metaphor, into a profound call that made people listen and made people stand, and made people move, and made people march. Everyone who knew her or heard her understood why we needed to keep on moving, keep walking, keep on breathing, keep on singing, keep on marching. How many people could do that? I don’t know anyone else who could or did what Bernice did. She did it lovingly, she did it magnificently, and profoundly.”